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 O T H M A R 
 
 BY 
 
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 O U I D A 
 
 Ibe /oL^a^nee./ Louisa 
 
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 'I fear Life's many chaiiges ; not Death's changelessness 
 
 Lytton 
 
 A NEW EDITION 
 
 CHATTO & VVINDUS, PICCADILLY 
 
 1886
 
 errs 
 
 PRINTED BV 
 
 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 
 LONDON
 
 O T H M A R. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Under the forest-trees of a stately place there was held a Court 
 of Love, in imitation and revival of those pretty pageantries and 
 tournaments of tongues which were the chief social and royal 
 diversion of the Italy of Lucrezia Borgia and the France of 
 Marguerite de Valois. 
 
 It was a golden August afternoon, towards the close of a day 
 which had been hot, fragrant, full of lovely lights and shadows. 
 Throned on a hill a mighty castle rose, aerial, fantastic, stately, 
 with its colonnades of stone rose-garlanded, and its stone stair- 
 cases descending into bowers of foliage and foam of flowers. Its 
 steep roofs were as sheets of silver in the sun, its many windows 
 caught the red glow from the west, and its bastions shelved 
 downward to meet smooth-shaven lawns and thickets of 
 oleanders luxuriant with blossom, crimson, white, or blush- 
 colour. In the woods around, the oaks and beeches wei-e heavy 
 with their densest leafage ; the deer couched under high 
 canopies of bracken and osmunda ; and the wild boars, sunk 
 deep in tangles of wild clematis and beds of meadow-sweet, 
 were too drowsy in the mellow warmth to hear the sounds of 
 human laughter which Avere wafted to them on the windle.^s 
 air. In the silent sunshiny vine-clad country which stretched 
 around those forests, in ' ?e|5ays de tire et de ne rien faire,^ from 
 many a steep church-steeple and many a little white chapel on 
 the edge of the great rivers or in the midst of the vast Avheat- 
 fields, the vesper-bell was sounding to small townships and tiny 
 hamlets. 
 
 It was seven o'clock, and the Court of Love was still open ; 
 the chamber of council, or throne-room, being a grassy oval, 
 with grassy seats raised around it, like the seats of an amphi- 
 theatre ; an open space where the forest joined the gardens, 
 with walls, first of clipped bay, and then of dense oak foliage, 
 around it ; the turf had been always kept shorn and rolled, and 
 the Qvergreena always clipped, and a marble fountain in thg 
 
 3
 
 2 OTHMAR. 
 
 centre of the <,'ras&, of f;u;iis playing with naiads, bore an in« 
 scription testifying that, in the summer of the year of grace 
 1530, the Marguerite des INIargucrites had held a Court of Love 
 just there, using those same seats of turf, shadowed by those 
 same oak- boughs. 
 
 ' Why should we not liold one also ? If we have advanced 
 in anything, since the Valois time, it is in the art of intellectual 
 liair-splitting. We ought to be able to argue as many days 
 together as they did. Only, I presume, their advantage was 
 that they meant what they said, and we never or seldom do. 
 They, laughed or they sighed, and were sincere in both ; but we 
 do neither, we are ijonaiihuvs always, which is not a happy 
 temperament, nor an intellectually productive one.' 
 
 So had spoken the mistress of that stately place ; and so, her 
 word being law, had it been in the sunset hours before the nine 
 o'clock dinner ; and it was a pastime well suited to the luminous 
 evenings of late summer in 
 
 The hush of old warm woods that lie 
 Low in the Lap of evcnitii:, bright 
 And bathed in vast tranquillity. 
 
 She, herself, was seated on an ivory chair, carved with Hindoo 
 steel, and shaped like a curule chair of old Kome. Two little 
 pages, in costumes of the Yalois time, stood behind her, holding 
 large fans of peacock's plumes. 
 
 ' They are anachronisms,' she had said with a passing frown 
 at the fans, ' but they may remain, though quite certainly the 
 Valdis did not know anything of them anymore than they knew 
 of blue china and yellow^ tea.' 
 
 But the gorgeous green and gold and purple-eyed plumes 
 looked pretty, so she had let them stay. 
 
 ' We shall have so many jarring notes of "modernity" in 
 our discussions,' she had said, ' that one note the more in 
 decoration does not matter ; ' and, backed by them, she sat now 
 upon her ivory throne, an exquisite ligure, poetic and delicate, 
 with her cream-white skirts of the same hue as her throne, and 
 her strings of great pearls at her throat. Next her was seat eel 
 an ecclesiastic of high eminence, who had in vain protested that 
 he was wholly out of place in such a diversion. ' Was Cardinal 
 Bembo out of place at Ferrara and Urbino ? ' she had objected ; 
 and had so successfully, in the end, vanquished his scruples, 
 that the late sunbeams, .slanting through the oak-leaves and on 
 to that gay asscmbla'^'c, had found out in it his handsome head 
 and his crimson sash, ami his l)lue eyes fub of their and keen 
 witty observation, and his white hands folded together on his 
 knee. 
 
 In a Hcuiicircle whose wings stretched right and left were 
 ranged tlie gentlemi'U and ladie.s who formed i«!^raentarily the
 
 OTHMAR. 3 
 
 house party of the cluiteau ; great people all ; all the women 
 young and all the men brilliant, no dull person amongst them, 
 dulness being the one vice condemned there without any chance 
 of pardon. They were charming people, distinguished people, 
 handsome people also, and they made a gay and gracious pic- 
 tui'e, reclining or sitting in any attitudes they chose on these 
 grassy slopes, which had seen the court of Francis and of both 
 Marguerites." 
 
 Above their heads floated a silken banner, on which, in 
 letters of gold, were embroidered the wise words, ' Qu'on m'aime, 
 mais avcc da V esprit ! ' 
 
 ' To return to our original demand — what is the definition of 
 Love?' asked their queen and president, turning her lovely 
 eyes on to the great ecclesiastic, who replied with becoming 
 gravity : 
 
 ' Madame, what can a humble priest possibly know of the 
 tlieme ? ' 
 
 She smiled a little, ' You know as much as Bembo knew, 
 she made answer. 
 
 ' Ah no, Madame ! The times are changed.' 
 
 'The times, perhaj^s ; not human nature. However, this is 
 the question which must be lirst decided by the Court at large : 
 How is the nature of Love to be defined ? ' 
 
 A gentleman on her left murmured : 
 
 * No one can tell us so as well you, Madame, who have torn 
 the poor butterfly in pieces so often satis merci.' 
 
 ' You have broken the first rule of all,' said the sovereign, 
 with severity. ' Tlie discussion is to be kept wholly free from 
 all personalities.' 
 
 ' A wise rule, or the Court would probably end, like an 
 Italian village festa, in a free use of the knife all round.' 
 
 ' If you be not quiet you will be exiled for contempt of 
 court, and shut up in the library to write out Ovid's " Ars 
 Amatoria." Once more, I inquire, how are we to define 
 Love ? ' 
 
 ' It was never intended to be defined, but to be enjoyed.' 
 
 ' That is merely begging the question,' said their Queen. 
 'One enjoys music, flowers, a delicate wine, a fine sunset, a 
 noble sonnet ; but all these things are nevertheless capable of 
 analysis and of reduction to known laws. So is Love. I ask 
 once more : How is it to be defined ? Does no one seem to 
 know ? What curious ignorance ! ' 
 
 ' In woman. Love may be defined to be the desire of annexa- 
 tion ; and to consist chiefly in a passionate clinging to a sense of 
 personal property in the creature loved.' 
 
 ' That is cynical, and may be true. But it is not general 
 enough. You must not separate tlie love of man and the love 
 of woman. We speak of Love general, human, concrete.' 
 
 b2
 
 4 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' With all deference I would observe that, if we did not 
 separate the two, we should never arrive at any real definition 
 at all. for Love differs according to sex as much as the physio- 
 gnomy or the costume.' 
 
 ' Real Love is devotion ! ' said a beautiful blonde with blue 
 eyes that gazed from under black lashes with pathetic tenderness. 
 
 ' Euh ! euh ! ' murmured one impertinent. 
 
 ' Oh, oh ! ' murmured another. 
 
 * Ouidie ! ' said a third under his breath. 
 
 The sovereign smiled ironically : 
 
 ' Ah, my dear Duchesse ! all that died out with the poets of 
 1830. It belongs to the time when women wore muslin gowns, 
 looked at the moon, and played the harp.' 
 
 'If I might venture on a deliuiiion in the langue verte,^ 
 suggested a handsome man, seated at the feet of the queen, 
 ' though I fear I should be turned out of Court as Rabelais and 
 Scarron are turned out of the drawing-room ' 
 
 ' We can imagine what it would be, and will not give you 
 the trouble to say any more. If the definition of Love be, on 
 tlie contrary, left to me, I shall include it all in one word — 
 Illusion.' 
 
 ' That is a cruel statement ! ' 
 
 ' It is a fact. We have our own ideal, which we temporarily 
 place in the person, and clothe with the likeness, of whoever is 
 fortunate enough to resemble it superficially enough to delude 
 us, unconsciously, into doing so. You remember tlie hackneyed 
 saying of the philosopher about the real John — the John as ho 
 thinks himself to be, and the John as others imagine him : it is 
 never ihe real John that is loved; always an imaginary one 
 built up out of the fancies of those in love witli him.' 
 
 ' That is fancy, your Majesty ; it is not love.' 
 
 'And what is love but fancy .' — the fancy of attraction, the 
 fancy of selection ; the same sort of fancy as allures the bird to 
 the brightest plumaged mate? ' 
 
 ' I do not think any love is likely to last which is not based 
 on intellectual sympathy. When the mind is interested and 
 contented, it docs not tire half so f.ist as the eyes or the pas- 
 sions. In any very great love there is at the commencement a 
 delighted sense of meeting something long sought, some supple- 
 ment of ourselves long desired in vain. When this pleasure is 
 based on the charm of some mind wholly akin to our own, and 
 fdled for us with ever-renewing well-springs of the intellect, 
 there is really liardly any rea.son why this mutual delight rhould 
 ever change, especially if circumstances conspire to free it from 
 those more oppressive and irritating forms of contact which the 
 prose of life entails.' 
 
 ' You mean marriage, only you put it with a great deal of 
 unnecessary euphuism. Tastes diller, Giovanni l)upre"3 id^aj
 
 OTHMAR. t 
 
 of bliss was to see his wife ironing linen, while his mother-in-law 
 looked on.' 
 
 ' Dupre was a simple soul, and a true artist, but intellect 
 was not his strong point. If he had chanced to be educated, 
 the good creature with her irons would have become very tire- 
 some to him.' 
 
 ' What an argument in favour of ignorance ! ' 
 
 ' Is it % The savage is content with roots and an earth-baked 
 bird ; but it does not follow, therefore, that delicate food does 
 not merit the preference we give to it. I grant, however, that 
 a high culture of taste and intelligence does not result in the 
 adoration of the primitive virtues any more than of the earth- 
 baked bird.' 
 
 ' Is this a discussion on Love % ' 
 
 'It is a discussion which grows out of it, like the mistletoe 
 out of the oak. The ideal of Dupre was that of a simple, un- 
 educated, emotional and unimpassioned creature ; it was what 
 we call essentially a bourgeois ideal. It would have been suflb- 
 cation and starvation, torture and death, to Raffiielle, to Phidias, 
 to Shelley, to Goethe. There are men, born peasants, who soar 
 into angels; who hate, loathe, and spurn the bourgeois idesil from 
 their earliest times of wretchedness ; but there are others who 
 always remain peasants. Millet did, Dupr^ did, Wordsworth 
 did.' 
 
 The queen tinkled her golden handbell and raised her ivory 
 sceptre. 
 
 ' These digressions are admirable in their way, but I must 
 recall the Court to the subject before them. Someone is bring- 
 ing in allusions to cookery, flat-irons, and the bourgeois ideal 
 which I have always understood was M. Thiers. Tiiey are 
 certainly, however interesting, wholly irrelevant to the theme 
 which we are met here to discuss. Let us pass on to the ques- 
 tion next upon the list. If no one can detine Love except as 
 devotion, that definition suits so few cases that we must accept 
 its existence without definition, and proceed to inquire what 
 are its characteristics and its results.' 
 
 ' The first is exigence and the second is ennui.^ 
 
 ' No, the first is sympathy and the second is happiness.* 
 
 ' That is very commonplace. Its chief characteristic appears 
 to me to be an extremely rapid transition from a state of im- 
 becile adoration to a state of irritable fatigue. 1 speak from the 
 masculine point of view.' 
 
 ' And I, from the feminine, classify it rather as a transition 
 (regretted but inevitable) from amiable illusions and generous 
 concessions to a Avounded sense of ofi"ence at ingratitude.' 
 
 ' We are coming to the Italian coUellate ! You both only 
 mean that in love, as in everything else which is human, people 
 who expect too much are disappointed j disappointment ia
 
 6 OTHMAR. 
 
 always irritation ; it may even become malignity if it take a 
 very severe form.' 
 
 ' You seem all of you to have glided into an apology for 
 inconstancy. Is tliat inevitable to love 1 ' 
 
 ' It looks as if it -were ; or, at all events, its forerunner, 
 fatigue, is so.' 
 
 ' You treat love as you would treat a man who asked you to 
 paint his portrait, whilst you persisted in painting that of his 
 shadow instead. The shadow which dogs his footsteps is not 
 himself." 
 
 ' It is cast by himself, so it is a part of him.' 
 
 ' No, it is an accompanying ghost sent by Nature which ho 
 cannot escape or dismiss.' 
 
 ' jMy good people,' said their sovereign impatiently, 'yo\i 
 wander too far afield. You are like the group of physicians 
 who let the patient die while they disputed over tlic Greek root 
 from wliich the name of his malady was derived. Love, like 
 all other great monarchs, is ill sometimes ; but let us consider 
 liim in health, not sickness.' 
 
 ' For Love in a state of health there is no better definition 
 than one given just now — sympatliy.' 
 
 ' The highest kind of love springs from the highest kind of 
 sympathy. Of that there is no doubt. But then that is only 
 to be foimd in the highest natures. They are not numerous.' 
 
 'No ; and even they require to possess a great reserve-fund 
 of interest, and a bottonik'ss deposit of inexhaustible compre- 
 hension. Such reserve-funds are rare in human nature, wliich 
 is usually a mere fretful and foolish chatterbox, tout en cMwrs, 
 and self-absorbed.' 
 
 ' We are wandering far from the single-minded passion of 
 Ronsard and Petrarca.' 
 
 * And we have arrived at no definition. Were I to give one, 
 I should be tempted to say that Love is, in health and j)crfcc- 
 tion, tlie sense that another life is absolutely necessary to our 
 own, is lovely despite its faults, and even in its follies is delight- 
 ful and precious to us, we cannot probably say wh}% and is to 
 us as the earth to the moon, as the moon to the tides, as the 
 lodestone to the steel, as tlic dew of nii^lit to the llower.' 
 
 'Very well said, and ajiplicable to both men and women, as 
 descriptive of their emotions at certain periods of their lives. 
 But ' 
 
 'For all their lives, until the ice of age glides into their 
 veins.' 
 
 ' You are poetical enough for Ronsard. Woll, let us pass to 
 anf>t]icr question. Does Love die sooner of starvation or of 
 repletion / ' 
 
 'Of repletion, unquestionably. Of a (it of indigestion ho 
 perishes never to rise again. Starved, lie will linger on sometimca
 
 OTHMAR. 7 
 
 for a very long while indeed, and at the first glance of pity 
 revives in full vigour.' 
 
 ' Why, then, do women usually commit the error of surfeit- 
 ing him % For I agree with you that a surfeit is fatal.' 
 
 ' Because most women cannot be brought to understand that 
 too much of themselves may bring about a wayward wish to have 
 none of them. They call this natural and inevitable reaction 
 ingratitude and inconstancy, but it is nothiiig of the kind ; it is 
 only human nature.' 
 
 'Male human nature. The wish for pastures new, charac- 
 teristic of cattle, sheep and man.' 
 
 ' "ia/enime est si souvent trompee parce qu''elleprend le desir 
 j)our I'amour." Someone wrote that ; I forget who did, but it 
 is entirely true. Uiie bonffee de dcsir, an hour's caprice, a swift 
 flaming of mere animal passion which flares np and dies down 
 like any shooting star, seems to a woman to be the ideal love of 
 romance and of tragedy. She dreams of Othello, of Anthony, 
 of Stradella, and all the while it is Sir Harry Wildair, or Joseph 
 Surface, or at the best of things Almaviva. She is ready for 
 the tomb in Verona, but he is only ready for the chambre 
 meuhlee, or at most for the saison aux eaux.' 
 
 ' Is she always ready for the tomb in Verona ? ' asked a 
 sceptical voice. ' Does she not sometimes, even very often, 
 marry Paris, and "carry on" with Romeo 1 If I may be 
 allowed to say so, there are a few impassioned and profound 
 temperaments in the world to many light ones ; the bread and 
 the sack are, as usual, unevenly apportioned, but these graver 
 and deeper natures are not all necessarily feminine. It is Avhen 
 you have two great and ardent natures involved (and then alone) 
 that you get passion, high devotion, tragedy ; but this conjunc- 
 tion is as rare as the passing of Venus across the sun. Usually 
 Romeo throws himself away on some Lady Frivolous, and 
 Juliet breaks her heart for some fop or some fool.' 
 
 ' That is only because all human life is a game of cross pur- 
 l^oses ; one only wonders who first set the game going, to amuse 
 the gods or make them weep. ' 
 
 ' That question will scarcely come under the head of amatory 
 analysis. Besides, the world has been Avondering about.uint ever 
 since the beginning of time, and has never received any answer 
 to its queries.' 
 
 ' If a quotation be allowed,' suggested the ecclesiastic, ' in 
 lieu of an original opinion, I would beg leave to recall the 
 Prince de Ligne's " Dans V amour il li'y a que Ics commencements 
 qui sent charm ants.'" In the middle of the romance I see you 
 all yawn, at the end you usually cjuarrel. Some wise man — I 
 forget who — has said that it requires much more talent and 
 niucli more feeling to break oft' an attachment amiably than to 
 begin it,'
 
 8 OTJIMAR. 
 
 * Because we all feel so amiable at the beginning that it is 
 easy to be so.' 
 
 ' Acbr.it also that there are very few characters which will 
 stand the test of intimacy ; very few minds of suflicient charm 
 and originality to be able to bear the strain of long and familiar 
 intercourse.' 
 
 ' What has the mind to do Avith it ? ' 
 
 ' That question is flijipant and even coarse. The mind has 
 something to do with it, even in animals ; or why should the 
 lion prefer one lioness to another I When d'Aubiac went to the 
 gallows kissing a tiny velvet muff of Margaret de Valois, or 
 when young Calixte deMontmorin knelt on the scatlbld pressing 
 to his lips a little bow of blue ribbon wliich had belonged to 
 Madame de Vintimille, the muff and the ribbon represented a 
 love with which certainly the soul had far more to do than the 
 senses.' 
 
 ' It was a sentiment.' 
 
 ' A sentiment if you will, but strong enough to overcome all 
 fear of death or personal regret. The muff, tlie ribbon, were 
 symbols of an imperishable and spiritual devotion; these trifles, 
 like Psyche's butterfly, were representative of an immortal 
 element in mortal life and mortal feeling.' 
 
 ' M. de Bethune would go to the scaffold like that himself,' 
 said the sovereign lady with a smile of approval and of indul- 
 g ent derision. 
 
 'And our lady,' hinted the Due de Bethune, 'forgets her 
 own rule, that all personalities are forbidden.' 
 
 ' It is of no use to have the power to make laws if one have 
 not also the power to transgress them. AVell, if immortality is 
 to enter into love, let wit also enter there. One is not beheaded 
 every da}', but every day one is liable to be bored. J'aime qii'on 
 m'aime, mais avec de Vesprit. Every intellectual person must 
 exact that. To worship my ribbon is nothing if you also fatigue 
 my jiatience and my ear. The majority of peDjile divorce love 
 and wit. Tliey are very wrong. It is only wit wliich can tell 
 love when he has gone too far, or is losing ground, has repeated 
 himself ad nauseam, or requires .absence to restore his charm.' 
 
 ' yi/j, Majcstc ! by the time lie has become such a jihilosopher 
 has ho not ceased to be love at all / ' 
 
 ' Oh no. That motto was chosen as the legend of this Court 
 expressly for the trutli it contains. Why does most love end so 
 drearily in a sudden death by quarrelling or in a lingering death 
 by tedium ? Because it has liad no wit, no judgment, no re- 
 serve, no skill. By way of showing itself to be eternal, it has 
 hammered itself into pieces on the rock of repetition. QxCon 
 m'aime, mais nirc dc I'csprit ! What a world of endured en?vui 
 sighs fortli in that appeal ! ' 
 
 ' No woman upon earth has had so much hjve given her a3
 
 OTHMAR. 9 
 
 the chatelaine of Amyot, and no woman on earth ever viewed 
 love with such unkind and airy contempt.' 
 
 She smiled. She neither denied nor affirmed the accusa- 
 tion. 
 
 ' She has a crystal throne of her own from which she looks 
 down on the weaknesses of mortals and cannot be touched by 
 them,' said the Due de Bethune. 
 
 She replied again, ' QxCon m'aime, mais avec de Vesprit.'' 
 
 ' It is the motto of one who sets much greater store upon 
 amusement than upon affection. Who can say, moreover, what 
 may have the good fortune to be considered "esj;rtT' by her? 
 I fear she finds us all very dull to-day.' 
 
 'Dull, no. Sentimental perhaps.' 
 
 ' Your heaviest word of censure ! ' 
 
 ' To return to our theme : do you not punish inconstancy ? ' 
 
 ' Certainly not. In the first place, inconstancy is a wholly 
 involuntary, and therefore innocent, inclination. In the second, 
 if any one be so stujjid that he or she cannot keep the affections 
 they have once won, they deserve to lose them, and can claim 
 no pity.' 
 
 ' Surely they may be the victims of a sad and unmerited 
 fate ? ' 
 
 ' Unmerited — no. They have not known how to keep what 
 they had got. Probably they have worried it till it escaped in 
 desperation, as a child teases a bird in a cage till the bird pushes 
 itself through the bars, preferring the chance of losing itself 
 on the road to the certainty of being strangled in prison.' 
 
 ' Who would not prefer it l ' 
 
 ' The difficulty in most cases is that, in all loves, the scales 
 of proportion arc weighted unevenly : there is generally one 
 lighter than the other. Say it is a poor nature and a great 
 nature ; say it is a strong passion and a passing caprice ; say it 
 is a profound temperament and a shallow one ; in some Avay or 
 other the scales are almost always imperfectly adjusted. When 
 they are quite even — which happens once out of a million times 
 ■ — then there is a great and felicitous love ; an exquisite and 
 imperishable sympathy.' 
 
 ' But who holds these magical scales 1 It is the holder who 
 is responsible.' 
 
 ' The holder is Fate.' 
 
 ' Chance.' 
 
 ' Opportunity.' 
 
 * Destiny.' 
 
 ' Predestination.' 
 ' Circumstance.' 
 
 * Affinity.' 
 
 ' Affinity can only hold them on that millionth occasion 
 when a perfect love is the result.'
 
 to or H MAR. 
 
 * Usually Chance and CircTimstance fill the scales, and they 
 are two roguish boj's who like to make mischief. Aflinity is the 
 angel ; perhaps the only angel by which poor humanity is ever 
 led into an earthly paradise.' 
 
 ' That is wortliy of Philip Sydney.' 
 
 * Or of the Eail of Lytton.' 
 
 ' And is so charming that we Avill not risk having anything 
 coarse or commonplace said after it. Let us adjourn the debate 
 till to-morrow.' 
 
 ' Nay, Majeste ; let us pass to another question : What is the 
 greatest dilemma of Love ? ' 
 
 ' To have to galvanise itself into an imitation of life when it 
 is dead.' 
 
 ' Is it worse to be the last to love, or the first to grow tired ? ' 
 
 ' In the former case one's self-esteem is hurt ; in the latter 
 one's conscience.' 
 
 ' The wounds of conscience arc sooner cured than those of 
 vanity.' 
 
 ' Whoever loves most loves longest.' 
 
 ' No, whoever is least loved loves longest.* 
 
 ' How is that to be explained 1 ' 
 
 ' The contradictions of human nature will usually suffice to 
 explain everything.' 
 
 ' Uut there may be another explanation also ; the one who is 
 least loved is the least cloyed, and the most apprehensive of 
 alteration.' 
 
 ' Love is best worked with egotism, as gold is worked with 
 alloy.' 
 
 ' Surely the essential loveliness of love is self-sacrifice ? ' 
 
 ' That is a theory. In fact, the only satisfactory love is one 
 ■which gives and receives mutual pleasure. When there is self- 
 sacrifice on one side the pleasure also is one-sided.' 
 
 ' Then the revellers of the Decamerono knew more of lovo 
 than Dante ? ' 
 
 ' That is approaching a theme too fidl of dangers to be dis- 
 cussed — the ditlerence between physical and spiritual hive. 1 
 do not consider that you have satisfactorily answered the pre- 
 vious question : What is the greatest dilemma of Love ? ' 
 
 ' \\ hen, in the open doorway of its house of life, one passion, 
 grown old and grey, passes out limjjing, and meets anotjier 
 passion newly come tliither, and laughing, with the blossoms of 
 April in its sunny hair.' 
 
 ' Wliat a sonnet in a sentence ! What is Love to do in such 
 a case ? Shall he detain the grej'-haired crippled guest ?' 
 
 'Pie cannot. Fi>r tlie more lie shall endeavour to retain 
 liim the tliinner and paler and more impalpable will the withered 
 and lame i)assion grow.' 
 
 ' And the newly-come one 1'
 
 OTHMAR. II 
 
 ' Oh, he will enter, smiling and strong, and will fill the 
 house with the music of his pipe and the odour of his hyacinths 
 for awhile, until he too shall in turn pass outwards, when his 
 music is silent and his flowers are dead.' 
 
 ' Is Love then always to be mourned like Lycidas V 
 
 ' He is in no sense like Lycidas ; Lycidas died, a perfect 
 youth. Love, with time, grows pale and wan and feeble, and a 
 very shadow of itself, before it dies.' 
 
 ' There are some who say, if he have not immortality he is 
 not Love at all ; but only Caprice, Vanity, Wantonness, or 
 faithless Fancy, masquerading in his dress.' 
 
 ' How can that be innnortal which has no existence without 
 mortal forms % ' . 
 
 ' Here is one of the notes of modernity ! The sad note of 
 self-consciousness ; the consciousness of mortality and of insigni- 
 ficance ; the memento mori which is always with us. And yet 
 we do not respect death, we only hate it and fear it ; because it 
 will make of us a dreary, ugly, putrid thing. That is all we 
 know. And the knowledge dulls even our diversions. We can 
 be gouaiUeur, but we cannot be gay if we would.' 
 
 ' There is too great a tendency here to use gros mots — devo- 
 tion, death, immortality^ t^'C. They are a mistake in a disquisi- 
 tion which wishes to be witty. They are like the use of cannon 
 in an opera. But I think, even in France, the secret of light- 
 ness of wit is lost. We have all read too much German philo- 
 sophy. ' 
 
 ' We will endeavour to be gayer to-morrow. We will wake 
 all the shades of Brantome.' 
 
 ' Well,' their sovereign declared, as she rose, ' we have held 
 our Court to little avail ; some pretty things have been said, 
 and some stupid ones, but we have arrived at no definite con- 
 clusion, unless it be this : that love is only respectable when it 
 is unhappy, and ceases to exist the moment it is contented.' 
 
 ' A cruel sentence, Madame ! ' 
 
 ' Human nature is cruel ; so is Time.' 
 
 When the sun had wholly set, and only a warm yellow glow 
 through all the west told that its glory had passed, the Court 
 broke up for that day, and strolled in picturesque groups 
 towards the house as the chimes of the clock tower told the 
 hour of dinner. 
 
 ' How very characteristic of our time and of our world,' said 
 the queen, as she drew her ivory-hued, violet-laden skirts over 
 the smooth turf. ' We have talked for three whole hours of 
 Love, and nobody has ever thought of mentioning Marriage as 
 his kinsman ! ' 
 
 ' He who has had the honour to marry you might well have 
 done so, had he been here to-day,' murmured a courtier on her 
 right.
 
 li OTIIMAR. 
 
 She laiiglied, looking up into the deep-blue evening sky 
 through the network of green leaves : 
 
 ' But he was not here, so he was saved the difficulty of 
 choice between an insincerity and a rudeness, always a very 
 serious dilennna to hiui. Marriage is the grave of love, my 
 dear friend, even if he be buried with roses for his jjillow and 
 lilies for his shroud.' 
 
 'But Love may be stronger than Death. Solomon has 
 said so.' 
 
 ' >Vhat is stronger than Death ? Death is stronger than all 
 of us. Tout cela pourrira. It is the despair of the lover and 
 the poet, and the consolation of the beggar when the rich and 
 the beautiful go past him.' 
 
 ' She spoke with a certain melancholy, and absently struck 
 the tall heads of seeding grasses Avith her ivory sceptre. 
 
 ' We have only wearied you, I fear,' said her companion, 
 with contrition and mortitication. 
 
 ' That is the fault of Love,' she answered, with a smile. 
 
 As they left the shadow of the trees, crossing the grassland 
 was a herd of cows and calves already passing away in the dis- 
 tance, going to their byres ; far beliind them, lingering willingly, 
 were the herdsman and his love ; he a comely lad in a blue 
 blouse and a peaked cap, she a smiling buxom maiden with 
 dusky tresses under a linen coif, and cheeks glowing like a 
 ' Catherine pear, the side that's next the sun.' 
 
 'Lubin and Lisette,' said Bethune witli a smile, 'practically 
 illustrating what we have been spoiling with the too tine wire- 
 drawing of analysis. I am sure that they come much nearer 
 than we to the story-tellers of the Ileptanieron.' 
 
 Tlie chatelaine of Amyot looked at the two rustic lovers with 
 a little wistfulncss and a good-natured contempt. 
 
 They had passed f)ut of the shade of tlie woods, and the 
 rose-glow of evening illumined their interlaced figures as they 
 followed tlu'ir cows. 
 
 '"To know is much, yet to enjoy is more," ' she quoted. 
 ' I suppose that is what you mean. Yet I rather incline to 
 think tliat love as a sentiment is the product of education. 
 The cows know almost as much of it as your Lubin and 
 Lisette.' 
 
 ' Brandes says,' observed one of her party, ' that love as a 
 sentiment was always unknown in a state of nature, and was 
 only created with tlio first petticoat. Petticoats have in- 
 variably been resixinsihle for a great deal. Jliey ruined 
 France, according to the Great Frederic ; but if they have 
 raised m from the level <jf the cattle they have redeemed their 
 repute.' 
 
 ' Poor cattle ! They have as much poetry in their eyes as 
 there is in the Pcnaoiosu. Lubin and Lisutto are Nalnrkindcr ',
 
 OTHMAR. 13 
 
 but when both a cow and Lisctto become the property of Lubin, 
 he will assign the higher place to the iirst, both in life and in 
 death. ' 
 
 ' Well, he shall have both of them, for having met us at so 
 apropos an instant,' she answered v/ith a little smile. ' Perhaps 
 the only word of truth that has been said in the whole discussion 
 was the quotation : " II n'j/ a que les commencements ([ui sont 
 clwirmaids ! " ' 
 
 The great woodland which they traversed as she spoke 
 opened into an avenue of beeches, long and straight, the 
 branches meeting and inteilacing overhead until the opening at 
 the farther end looked like an arched doorway closing a cathe- 
 dral aisle. The archway was filled with dim golden suffused 
 light, and within that archway of twilight and golden haze there 
 rose the snowy column of a high-reaching fountain ; it was the 
 first of the grandes cnux of the garden of Amyot. And the 
 sovereign of the Court of Love was she who had once been the 
 Princess Napraxine. 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 As they entered on the smoother sward of the stately gardens a 
 figure came out of the deep shadow of clipped walls of bay and 
 approached them. 
 
 ' Is the Court over ? At what decision has it arrived ? ' said 
 the master of Amyot as he saluted the party and kissed the 
 hand of his wife with a graceful formality of greeting. 
 
 ' It will have to sit for half a century if it be compelled to 
 come to any,' returned the chatelaine. 'We have said many 
 pretty things about love, Be'thune in especial ; but we met 
 Lubin with Lisette loitering behind their cows, and I fear 
 the living commentary was truer to nature than all our doc- 
 trines.' 
 
 ' The only issue of its resolutions is that you are to give away 
 a cow and a maiden to the admirable lover,' said M. de Be'thune. 
 'He crossed our path just in time to point a moral for us : we 
 were all sadly in want of one.' 
 
 ' Could you not agree then ? Surely you chose a very simple 
 subject? ' 
 
 ' It might be simple in the days of Philemon and Baucis. It 
 is sufficiently complicated now. Is the sentiment Avhich sent 
 d'Aubiac to the scaffold, pressing a little blue velvet muff' to his 
 lips, the same thing as the unpoetic impulse which makes the 
 ftmelh de Vhomme sought by Tom, Dick, and Harry 1 You will 
 admit that a vast field of the most various emotions separates the 
 two kinds of passion ? '
 
 14 OTHMAR 
 
 * Certainly : there is a great diilerence between Montrose's 
 Farewell and Sir John Suckling's verses.' 
 
 ' Precisely : so we came to no decision. We have all too 
 much of the terrible modern tendency to hesitation and melan- 
 choly, I do not know why ; unless it come from tlie conviction 
 of all of us that love is always melancholy when it is not 
 absurd.' 
 
 ' What a cruel sentiment ! ' 
 
 ' A perfectly true assertion. The only loves respectalJe in 
 tradition are those which have ended wretchedly. Suppose 
 Romeo had been happy ; or Stradella ; what do you tliiuk the 
 poets could have made of them \ Love must end somehow : if 
 it end in tragedy its dignity is saved like Csesar's.' 
 
 ' But wliy need it end ? You, at least, have seen that 
 through all disappointments it can endure,' murmured he who 
 had cited the love of d'Aubiac for JMarguerite. 
 
 She looked at him and shrugged her shoulders ever so 
 slightly. 
 
 ' Love is, so unhappily, like a comet. It mounts to its 
 perihelion, increasing in splendour as it goes, and then slowly, 
 little by little, the gloiy departs, the sovereign of the skies 
 grows less and less, until at last there is no more sign of it any- 
 Avliere, and all is darkness. But the comet is not really gone ; 
 it has only gone — elsewhere.' 
 
 Her slight delicate laugh robbed the speech of the melan- 
 choly which it would otherwise have possessed. 
 
 ' jMy wife believes in no constancy,' said Othmar. 
 
 She looked at him with her mysterious smile : 
 
 ' I believe in Romeo's, I believe in Stradella's, because the 
 kindness of death saved them from the ridicule of forswearing 
 themselves. What a pity you did not come home a little sooner. 
 You would have been an invaluable ally to the sentimentalists 
 lieaded by Bethune. lie was ehjiiuent, but his cause was 
 weak.' 
 
 ' My cause was strong,' said the Due de Bethune ; ' it was 
 my tongue which lacked persuasiveness.' 
 
 * No, you were very poetical ; you Avcrc only not convincing. 
 My dear friend, we are too scientific in tliese days for senti- 
 ment to have any abiding place in us ; we are pessimists, it is 
 true, but we mourn for ourselves, not for others. We are 
 neither gay enough nor sad enough to do justice to such dis- 
 cussions as this which we have tried to revive ; we are only 
 bored. We do not take our fooling joyously f)r our sorrows 
 dee])ly. We are uneasily con.sciou3 tliat we are childish and 
 unreal in both. Then there is the incurable modern tendency 
 to end evei-ything with a laugh en (iinuiilknr, yet with tears in 
 OUT eyes. We ai'O always ridiculing ourselves, yet wo are 
 always vexed that, ridiculous as wc are, we must still die.'
 
 OTHMAR. 15 
 
 * At the present moment we must still eat,' said Othmar, as 
 the boom of a silver-toned gong came over the gardens in deep 
 waves of sound. 
 
 It Avas nine o'clock, and that repast which had been used to 
 be called in the Valois Amyot arriere-grand-souper, and was now 
 called 'dinner,' awaited them. 
 
 Th6re were some twenty-five guests then staying there ; she 
 did not approve of immense house parties, and she restricted 
 her house list to the very choicest of her favourites and 
 associates ; she always asked double the number of men to that 
 of women, but she Avas proportionately careful that the latter 
 should be those whom men most liked and admired ; she was 
 wholly above the petty envies and jealousies of her sex. Her 
 vanity rather consisted in having it said that she feared no 
 rivals. 
 
 As the deep boom of the gong sounded from the house, she 
 and her guests passed onward, and in their Valois dresses were 
 soon seated in the summer banqucting-room : a modern addition 
 to the chateau, an open loggia in the Italian style, with marble 
 floor and marble columns, one side open to the air, the other 
 sides rich in white marble bas-reliefs by French sculptors ; the 
 ceiling had been painted by Puvis de Chavannes with the story 
 of Europa. In each corner there were tall palms in large 
 square cases of white porcelain ; the white columns were 
 garlanded by passion-flowers, which grew without ; at either 
 end there was a fountain, their basins filled with gold fish and 
 water-lilies ; thruugh the columns the whole enclianting view 
 of the west gardens was seen stretching far away to where the 
 Loire waters spread wide as a lake and mirroring the newly- 
 risen moon. 
 
 ' I had it built,' she said, in answer to some one who com- 
 plimented her upon it. ' There is a great dining-hall and a 
 small dining-room indoors, but neither are fitted for summer 
 evenings. It is a barbarism to be shut up within four walls 
 just as the moon rises and the nightingales sing. The matter 
 of food is always a distressingly coarse question ; nothing can 
 really spiritualise or redeem it, but at least it may be divested 
 of some of its brute aspects. A delicate cuisine does that for 
 us in some measure, and the scene we have around us may do 
 more. The London and Paris habit of sitting in mere boxes, 
 more or less well decorated, is horrible. Perfect ease, vast 
 space, and soft shadowy distances are absolutely necessary to 
 preserve illusions as we dine.' 
 
 And to that end she had caused to be built the loggia of 
 Amyot, with as much celerity and breathless obedience to her 
 commands as the architects of the East showed a sultan of 
 Bagdad or Benares when he bade a palace of marble ui)rise 
 from thu sand. Her fine taste would not have allowed her to
 
 i6 OTIIMAR. 
 
 hurt the arcliitecturo of Amyot Avith any incongruity, however 
 iiuah her ciiprices niiglit have desired it ; but the marble loggia 
 accorded in exterior witli the Renaissance outline of the 
 chateau, and the tone of Primaticcio and the epoch of Jean 
 (Joujon had been faithfully followed in its internal decoration. 
 
 ' What a perfect place it is ! * said one of her guests to her 
 after dinner. 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 ' In August, yes. When the terraces are hung with ice, and 
 the forests black with winter storm, it is not so perfect. All 
 places have their season, like all lives.' 
 
 'There are some places, like some lives, which can never 
 lose their beauty.' 
 
 ' Do you think so ? I liave never found them. AVhen one 
 knows every leaf, every stone, every fence, the beauty of the 
 place fades for us as it does Avhen one knows every impulse, 
 every prejudice, every fault, and every virtue of the life.' 
 
 'A melancholy truth — if it be a truth. Perhaps it is only 
 half a one. There are people who love their homes.' 
 
 ' There are prisoners who have loved their cells ! Amyot is 
 deliglitful in many ways, but I have no more sense of home in 
 it tlian a swallow has in tlie eaves it builds under for one 
 sun.mer. You must go to the vinedresser's, wife in the clitf 
 cabin on the river for that.^ 
 
 ' Tlien the vinedresser's wife has a jewel which the great 
 chatelaine's crown is without ? ' 
 
 'A jewel? Arc you sure it is a jewel? I think there is 
 much to be said in favour of the restlessness of our world, it 
 saves us from rust and rejection ; it makes us unprejudiced and 
 cosmopolitan ; it annihilates nationalities and antipathies. I 
 imagine, if Horace had lived now, he would never have been 
 still ; he would have seen the farm in its pleasantest season, 
 aiul that only. He would have carried with him the undying 
 lamp of his enchanting temperament, and he would have been 
 liapjjy anywhere.' 
 
 * But is it really incomprehensible to you, the love of home ? ' 
 
 ' I think so. I have lived in too many jdaces. We are a 
 fi;w montlis here, a few months in Paris, a few weeks in the 
 Riviera, a few weeks in Russia, or Vienna, or London. It is 
 impossible to carrj'^ about the sense of home pcripatctieally with 
 }ou as the snail carries liis shell. The sparrow feels it, the 
 swallow docs not. I have always had a number of houses in 
 wliich I spend a number of months, of weeks, of days. I like 
 e.ich of them to be perfect in its own way, and I like each to 
 have copies of my favourite hooks in it : the siglit of Goetlie, of 
 Moli^re, of Horace makes one feel dicz sol. That is a.s near 
 " home " as I approach, I imagine all happiness is much more 
 a matter of temperament than of place or of circumstance.'
 
 OTHMAR. 17 
 
 ' I do not believe you are happy even now ! ' 
 
 It was a personal speech, and too bold a one to be justi- 
 fied even by intimate and privileged friendship. But she was 
 moved to it by that ever ready and pitiless self-analysis which 
 made her as severe a critic of herself as of others. 
 
 ' Happy ? Oh, I must be,' she said with a smile. ' Who 
 on earth should be hapj^y if I am not ? 1 have all the vulgar 
 attributes of happiness in prof\ision and all the more delicate 
 ones too. If I am not so, it can only be because my tempera- 
 ment is the very opposite of a porte-bonlieiir like Horace's. I 
 have always expected too much of everything and of everybody, 
 and yet I am not at all what you would call an imaginative 
 person. I ought to be prosaically contented with the world as 
 it is. But 1 am not.' 
 
 It was a sulti-y and lovely August night. The sky was 
 radiant and the white lustre of the full moon shone over all the 
 scene, making the gardens, the terraces, the fountains, the 
 jiarterres of flowers light as day, and leaving the masses of the 
 great forest which surrounded them in deepest shadow. It was 
 haunted ground, this stately and royal place where both 
 Marguerites had passed in turn summers dead three centuries 
 ago ; where the one, witty, wise and faithful, had read the tales 
 of her Heptameron beneath its spreading oaks ; and the other, 
 lovely, perilous and faithless, had gathered its roses and ruffled 
 them, murmuring the 'tm peu — beaucoup — passionnement,' as 
 one passion liotly chased another from her fickle breast, each 
 scarce living the life of the gathered rose. 
 
 The present chatelaine of Amj'ot, leaning against one of tlie 
 marble columns of her summer dining-hall, and listening to the 
 words of a friend wlio dared tell her truths, looked out into the 
 wide white moonlight, on to the trellised rose walks, the turf 
 smooth as velvet, bordered with ground ivy ; the marble statues 
 standing against the high "walls of close-clipped evergreens ; 
 the deep and sombre forests which held the heart of so many 
 secrets, the story of so many lives and of so many deaths, safe 
 shut away for ever, dumb and dead in the eternal mystery of 
 its vernal solitudes. If she were not happy who should be / 
 
 But happiness— what an immense word ! — or what a little 
 one ! A poet's dream of paradise, or the peasant's contentment 
 in the chimney-corner and the pot of soup ! Which you will — 
 but never both at once. 
 
 She was as happy as a very analytical and fastidious nature 
 can possibly bo, but at times her old enemy dissatisfaction 
 looked in over the flowers and through the golden air. She 
 was pursued by her old consciousness that the human race was 
 after all exceedingly limited in its capabilities, and the lives of 
 men on the whole very wearisome. There was with her that 
 vague disappointment and dissatisfaction which come to most of 
 
 C
 
 l8 OTHMAR. 
 
 us when we have done what we wished to do. There is a mono- 
 tony even in what is most agreeable, which makes all happiness 
 dull after awhile. Priests tells us that this unpleasant weari- 
 ness is intended to detach us from the joys of earth, and philo- 
 sophers are content to tind its solution in the physiology of the 
 senses, liut Avhether explained sentimentally or scientifically, 
 the result is the same : that expectation makes up so large a 
 component part of pleasure that, when there is nothing new to 
 expect, pleasure becomes so attenuated as to be scai-cely visible. 
 
 All loves which have been constant and become famous have 
 boon tliose to which immense dilhcultics arose, where perils 
 supplied the element of an unending interest. It is when they 
 can only behold each other in the stolen hours of the moonlight, 
 that Itomeo and Giulietta are to each other divinely fair. Were 
 they condemned to face each other at dinner every night for ten 
 years, what divinity would be left for either in the eyes of the 
 other ? 
 
 Habit and love cannot dwell together. As well ask the rose 
 to flower beneath a slab of stone. 
 
 'Happiness is not of this world,' she said, with a little 
 dreamy lingering smile. ' Is not that what your brethren are 
 always telling us \ ' 
 
 Melville answered with a sigh : 
 
 ' May this not prove that we may at least hope for it in some 
 other 1 ' 
 
 'Yes, I think,' she replied, rather to herself than to him, 
 ' I think with you ; the strongest argument (if any are strong) 
 in favour of the future development of the soul, is tlie absolute 
 impossibility for anybody Avith any average mind to be conteitu 
 with what he or she finds in human existence. Life is a pretty 
 enough picture for people like ourselves ; it is sometimes a 
 pageant, it is sometimes even a poem, but it is all wonderfullj'^ 
 unproductive and circumscribed. Except in a few hours of 
 passion or exultation, we are sensible of the flatness and insuffi- 
 ciency of it all. We liave ideals which may be only remem- 
 brance, but if not must surely be prevision ; ideals which, at 
 any rate, are larger and of another atmosphere than anything 
 which belongs to earth.' 
 
 Her voice grew soft and dreamy, and had a tone in it of 
 wistful regret. It was nut the mere dissatisfaction of the 
 e«iiu;/{:c which moved her. She had liad lier own way in life, 
 and the success of it had become monotonous. 
 
 ' Yes,' she repeated v.ilh a little laugh, which was not very 
 gay ; ' I supposu it nuisl 1 c the .soul in us ; that odd, unipiiot, 
 dis.satislied, naniclcss tiling inside us, whicli is always crying, 
 " Give, give, give ! " and never gets what it wants. Our dis- 
 content must be tile jiioof of something in us meant for belter 
 things, just as the eternal revolutions of Paris are the proof of
 
 OTHMAR. 19 
 
 its people's genius. What a night it is ! It wants Lorenzo and 
 Jessica, but they are not here. There are flirtations and in- 
 trigues enough indoors, but Lorenzo and Jessica are not of our 
 world. It is a pity. The moon seems to look for them.' 
 
 Then she left the marble loggia and went amongst her 
 guests, who were gathering together in the silver drawing-room, 
 as the sounds of music, in the ever-youthful ' Invitation k, la 
 Yalse/ called them, with midnight, to the ball-room. Gervase 
 Melville strayed away by himself through the moonlit aisles of 
 roses, 
 
 ' Always the pebble of ennui in the golden slipper of plea- 
 sure,' he thought. ' Perhaps life is, after all, more evenly 
 balanced than the wooden shoe and the raofoed stocking will 
 ever believe. Perhaps in life, as they said to-day that it is in 
 love, hunger is a happier state than satiety. Perhaps, if Lorenzo 
 had never married Jessica, he would have written sonnets to her 
 all his life, as Petrarca wrote them to Laura ! The Lady of 
 Amyot is the most interesting woman I have ever known, but 
 she is the one person on eartli capable of making me doubt the 
 faith that I have lived and hope to die for ; when I am amongst 
 the green savages of Formosa or the drunken Indians of Ottawa, 
 I can still believe in the human soul ; but when I am with her 
 I doubt — I doubt — I doubt ! She is as exquisitely organised as 
 this gloxinia which is full of dew and of moonbeams ; but she 
 believes that she will have only her one brief passage on earth 
 like the gloxinia — the glory of a day — and alas ! who shall prove 
 that she is Avrong ? When she holds my creed in the hollow of 
 her white hand and smiles, it grows small and shrunken as a 
 daisy that is dead 1 ' 
 
 CHAPTER IIL 
 
 ' BuLWER has said that none preserve imagination after forty ; 
 does anyone preserve illusions after thirtf i ' said a very pretty 
 woman on lier thirty-second birthday. 
 
 Her liusband chivalrously replied, * Any one who lives beside 
 you wi 1 preserve them until he is a hundred.' 
 
 She looked at him dubiously, curiously, with a slight smile 
 which was a little cynical and a little pensive. 
 
 ' I was never famous for the culture of them,' she said, a 
 little regretfully. ' I do not know why you should have found 
 me so favourable to yours — if you have found me favourable,' 
 she added, after a jjause. 
 
 As the most eloquent and comprehensive answer he could 
 give, he kissed her hands. 
 
 She glanced at her face in the mirror ; she was certainly 
 
 c2
 
 :o OTIIMAR. 
 
 tliirty-two years old on this lust day of February. She did not 
 like it ; no -woman likes it. The Avay is not actually longer 
 because the traveller reads on a milestone the cipher which tells 
 him how many thousands of yards he has traversed and has still 
 to traverse, but the milestone suddenly and distastefully testi- 
 fies to distance, and increases the sense of fatigue which the 
 road has given. 
 
 ' If women had all a happy Euthanasia,' she said dreamily, 
 ' when they reach the age I am ntnv, what a good thing it would 
 be for the world. On her tliirtieth birthday every woman ought 
 to be put to death : mercifully, poetically, as the girl dies in the 
 " Faute de I'Abbe' Mouret," stifled in flowers, but securely put 
 to death.' 
 
 ' The world, ' said Othmar, smiling, 'would certainly be rid 
 of its most perilous enchantresses if your proposal became law.' 
 
 ' And how much prettier our drawing-rooms would look, 
 and how much effort and heartburning would be spared, if 
 every woman died before she began to " make up ! " Do you 
 know last night, in the mirror figure of the cotillion, as the men 
 looked over my shoulder one by one, I forgot all about them. 
 I only looked at my own face ; it seemed to me that there was 
 a sort of dimness in it, as there is on a photograph which has 
 been some years done ; not age exactly, but the shadow of age 
 which was coming up behind me as the men Avere coming, and 
 was looking over my shoulder as they looked. AVhy do you 
 laugh ? It was not agreeable to me. I was startled when the 
 voice of Hugo de Rochefort came behind my ear, "All, JNIadame, 
 is it possible ? Do you reject us all ? " I had quite forgotten 
 where I was, and why they v/ere all waiting. Perhaps Age 
 only meant to say to me, "Do not stay for the cotillions any 
 more ! " ' 
 
 ' If Age did, it certainly found no man living to agree with 
 it,' said her companion. ' If you will allow me to say so, I do 
 not recognise you in this unusual phase of self-depreciation. 
 What bee has stung you to-day \ ' 
 
 ' Self-knowledge, I suppose. Whatever philosophers may 
 declare to the contrary, it is a very uncomfortable companion.' 
 
 ' Surely that depends on one's mood I ' 
 
 ' Everything in life depends on one's mood. When I am 
 in another mof)d I shall say to myself that I have ten years left 
 in wliich I shall lie agreeable to myself and other people ; that 
 the young girls do not understand men and do not intluenco 
 them ; that a woman is always young so long as she retains her 
 power to please and to be pleased. There are live hundred 
 sopliisma witli which I can console m3'self, but just now I am 
 not in a humour to be consoled by them. 1 am only scnsiblo 
 of what is very frightful to think of — that a woman is allotted 
 threescore and ten years as well as a man, but that he may
 
 OTHMAR. 21 
 
 enjoy himself to the end of them, if only he keep his health ; 
 she comes to the close of her pleasures before her life is half 
 lived. With her, the preface is exquisite, the poem is delight- 
 ful, but the colophon is of such preposterous and odious length 
 and dulness, that it is out of all proportion to the brevity of the 
 romance.' 
 
 He smiled. 'I know that it is always hopeless to convince 
 you when you are in a pessimistic hvmiour.' 
 
 ' Oh yes ; into one's character, as into the characters of 
 others, one gets little flashes of real light here and there, now 
 and then ; the moments are not agreeable ; they are the flashes 
 of a policeman's lanthorn ; while they are shining disguise is 
 not possible.' 
 
 ' What do you see when they flash upon me % ' 
 
 ' Not very much that I would have changed except your 
 sentimentalities. ' 
 
 ' I am grateful.' 
 
 She looked at him curiously. * Did you doubt it ? ' 
 
 He answei'ed, ' Well, no ; not precisely. But with such a 
 character as yours one never knows.' 
 
 ' Is not that the charm of my character % ' 
 
 ' I think it is the secret of your ascendancy. No one can be 
 wholly, absolutely sure of what you are thinking far down in 
 the recesses of your immense thoughts. ' 
 
 ' That was what people use to say of Louis Napoleon, and 
 there never was a shallower creature. I think I have more 
 profundity than he ; but I have not so much as I had. Happi- 
 ness is not intellectual ; it tends to make one content, and 
 content is stupidity ; that is why Age looked into the cotillion 
 mirror to-night to remind me that I was getting stupid. No, 
 you are not to pay me any compliments, my dear ; after ten 
 years of them they have a certain /ttrfewr, though I am sure you 
 are sincere when you make them.' 
 
 She smiled and rose. 
 
 This was her thirty-second birthday. That unpleasant and 
 unpoetic fact shadowed life to her for the moment. She was 
 gtill young enough, and had potent chanu enough, of which 
 she was fully conscious, to own it frankly. The world was still 
 at her feet. She could afford to confess that she foresaw the 
 time when it would not be so. True, in a way she would 
 have a certain empire always. She would never altogether lose 
 her power over the minds of men when she should lose it over 
 their passions. But it would be a pale-grey kingdom, a sad 
 ehore, with sea-lavender blowing above silvery sand instead of 
 her own Ogygia, with its world of roses and its smiling suns. 
 
 Face it with what courage and charm she may, the thought 
 of age must always appal a woman. It takes so much ; it offers 
 nothing. True, some of the greatest passions the world has
 
 2Z OTHMAR. 
 
 seen have been born after youth had long passed, and have 
 bui'ned on till death with deeper fires of sunset than ever dawn 
 has seen. But a woman is not consoled by that possibility as 
 morning slides past her and the shadows grow long. 
 
 Othmar, without other rejily, opened the door of her dress- 
 ing-room, and there entered two small children, a boy and a girl 
 with faces like flowers, and sweet rosy mouths, carrying a large 
 gilded basket between them, filled with white lilac and gardenia. 
 They came up to her hand in hand, not very certain upon 
 their feet or in their speech, and bowed their little golden heads 
 with pretty reverence, and stammered together with birdlike 
 voices, ^ Bonne fete, maman.' 
 
 ' Here are your eternal courtiers,' said their father. ' Time 
 will make no ditierence in their worship of you.' 
 
 She smiled again, and took them together on her lap, and 
 kissed them with tenderness, her hand playing with their soft, 
 light curls. 
 
 But she said perversely, and a little sadly : ' My dear, how 
 can one tell ? That is only a phrase also. One never knows 
 wliat children may become. In fifteen or twenty years' time 
 Otho may send me a sommation respectuense, because he wants 
 to marry a circus-rider, and Xenia may hate me because I make 
 her accei:)t a grand-duke whilst she is in love with an attache. 
 One never can tell. Tliey are fond of me now, certainly.' 
 
 ' Tliey will as certainly love you always. ' 
 
 ' What an optimist you have grown ! It is flattering to me,' 
 she answered, as she caressed the children and gave them some 
 crystals of sugar. 'I cannot help seeing tilings as they are ; 
 you know I never could help it ; and the relations of parents 
 with their children, which are pretty and idyllic to begin with, 
 are often apt to alter to very gi'im prose as time goes on, and 
 separate interests arise to part them. Why docs no sovereign 
 wlio ever lived like his or her immediate heir ? Wiiy is the 
 crown prince always arrayed against the crown ? ' 
 
 ' I am very fond of my crown prince,' said Otlimar, as he 
 drew his young son to him. 
 
 ' He is not a crown prince yet ; he is a baby. Wait until he 
 does want to marry that circus-rider, or until you see him take 
 an opposite side in Euro])ean politics to yourself. It is when 
 the distinct Ego asserts itself in your cliild, in opposition to 
 your own entity, that tlie separation begins and the antagonism 
 rises.' 
 
 ' You will always analyse so mercilessly 1 ' 
 
 ' I can never be content with tlie world's commonplaces and 
 sophisms, if you mean that. And on this day, when I am 
 tliirty-two years old, no persuasion on cartli would convince me 
 that, when the time should come which will make me twice 
 that age, I shall be anything but an unhappy woman. It wiU
 
 OTHMAR. 23 
 
 not console me in the least that my grandchildi'en may wish mo 
 honne fetc.^ 
 
 ' I wonder if you are serious % ' 
 
 'I Avas never more so, I assure you. Life is a scries of 
 losses ; but a woman's losses outweigh a man's by a million. 
 From the first little line she sees between her eyebrows or 
 about her mouth, existence is nothing but a degrinrjolade for 
 her. To say that she is compensated for the loss of her empire 
 by becoming a grandmother is wlioUy absurd.' 
 
 'You always allut such a small space to the aflections !' 
 
 ' Madame de Sevigne allotted the largest tliat any clever 
 woman ever did or could. Do you tliink the chill philosophies 
 of Madame de Grignan I'ewarded her? Myself, jc iCal pas cdte 
 basse la. You know it very well. I am fond of these children, 
 because they are yours ; but I do not think them in the least 
 a compensation for growing old ! ' 
 
 ' As if years mattered to a woman of your wit ! ' 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 ' That is so like a man's clumsy idea of consolation. True, 
 wit, in theory, is very much admired, but, practically, nobody 
 cares much about it, unless it comes out of a handsome mouth. 
 Men prefer white shoulders. And ' 
 
 ' And your shoulders 1 ' said Othmar, with a smile. ' Are 
 they not of snow, and fit for Venus' self ? ' 
 
 * Oh, they are white as yet,' she cried indifferently. 
 
 ' For myself,' he added, ' I shall be delighted when the 
 faces of no aspirants are reflected in your cotillion mirror. I 
 detest all those men ' 
 
 ' Oh no, you do not,' she said tranquilly. 'If there were 
 none of them you would say to yourself, " Really, she is very 
 much aged." A man's love is always so made up of pride and 
 prejudice that if no one envy him what he has he soon ceases to 
 value it. On the whole, men go much more by the opinion of 
 the world than women do. A woman, if she take a fancy to a 
 cripple, or a hunchback, or a cretin, malces herself ridiculous 
 over him, without any regard to how she may be laughed at ; 
 but a man is always thinking of what they say at the clubs. In 
 his most headlong follies he is always nervous about the opinion 
 of the galerie.' 
 
 'You always think us such fools,' said Othmar, with some 
 ill humour. 
 
 ' Oh, no,' she said again with a smile, ' only I think you are, 
 in a way, more conscientious than we are, and in another way 
 more nervous. A woman, when she has a fancy for a thing, 
 would burn down half the world to get at it ; a man Avould 
 hesitate to sacrifice so many cities and people, and would also 
 be precccupied with the idea that he would be badly placed in 
 history for liis exploit.'
 
 24 OTHMAR. 
 
 * Then he is no true lover.' 
 
 ' Are there any true lovers ? ' 
 
 * I think you should be the last -woman who could doubt it.' 
 ' You want a compliment, but I shall not give it you. Or if 
 
 you mean the others — well, perhaps they have been, or they 
 are, true enough ; but then that is only because a uassion for 
 me has always been thought cVun chic incroyahle. I should 
 believe in the love of a man if I were a milkmaid, but when to 
 be in love with one is a mere fashion like the height of your 
 wheels or the shape of your mail, one may question its single- 
 mindedness. I have never, either, observed that the most de- 
 voted of them eat their dinner less regularly, or smoke less 
 often when they were unhappy. Even you, yourself, when you 
 were wasting with despair, did not refuse to dine or smoke.' 
 
 'Do not speak of that time,' said Othmar, with a look of 
 distress. ' As for your complaint against us, we are mere 
 machines in a great deal ; the machine goes on mechanically in 
 its daily exercise for its daily necessities ; that movement of 
 mechanism has nothing to do with the suffering of the soul. 
 Nothing can be more unjust than to confuse the one with the 
 other. You say a man cannot be a poet or a lover because he 
 eats a truffled beefsteak. I say it is the mechanical part of him 
 which eats the beefsteak, and eating it impairs neither his sen- 
 sitive nerves nor his ) assions. As for smoking, it is a consola- 
 tion because it is a sedative.' 
 
 'Admirably reasoned,' said Nadine, 'but you do not con- 
 vince mo. I am certain that the ccmventionalities and habits of 
 modern life do diminish the forces of passion. Wlien Tityteus 
 was forsaken by Musidora, and had only the priman'al Avoods, 
 the /o»s siiIclt, the mountain solicudes, and the silent sheep, his 
 grief could reign over him undivided ; but n waduys, when ho 
 dines out every evening, is made to laugh wliethcr he will or no, 
 finds a hundred engagements waiting for every hour, and has 
 the babble of the world etcrnaUy in liis ear, his remendjrance is 
 of a very attenuated sort. I do not say that he suffers nothixig, 
 but I do say that he often forgets that he suffers.' 
 
 'lam not at all sure of that,' said Othmar, ' and what is 
 more, I am almost disposed to think that the effort to affect 
 indifference whicli Society compels, is much more suffering than 
 the delightful permission which Nature gave your shepherd to 
 be as miserable as he pleased, unchecked and unremarked. 
 The world may cause the most excruciating torture to a man 
 who is compelled to be in it and of it, while some great pre- 
 occupation makes every thought except one alien and hateful.' 
 
 ' If the man have a great nature, perhaps. But how many 
 have ? ' 
 
 ' As many, or as few, as in tlie days of the shepherds. Tlio 
 ordinary Titytcus, I imagine, did not weep long for the ordinary
 
 OTHMAR. 25 
 
 Mnsidora, but soon tuned his pipe afresh and put new ribbons 
 on his crook.' 
 
 ' I do not quite think that ; I think all feelings were stronger, 
 warmer, deeper, more concentrated in the earlier ages of the 
 world. Nowadays we contrive to make everything absurd — 
 our heroes, our poets, our sorrows, our loves, all are dwarfed 
 by our treatment of them. Even death itself we have managed 
 to make ridiculous, and strip of all its majesty. Ulysses' self 
 ■would have looked grotesque if buried with the civil rites which 
 attended Gambetta to his tomb, or the religious rites which 
 mocked the prince of mockers, Disraeli. Whenever I die, I 
 hope you will let me be carried by young cliildren clad in white 
 to some green grave in your own woods, where only a stag will 
 come or a pretty hare. Will you bo unconventional enough for 
 that ? Or will you be afraid of the French municipalitiea and 
 the Russian popes % I should have courage to execute your last 
 wishes so, but whether you will have the courage to executo 
 
 mine Men are so much more timid than women ! ' 
 
 ' Do not talk of death ! ' said Othmar, with a passing 
 shudder. 
 
 ' Did I not say that men are cowards % ' 
 'Not for ourselves ; for those we love we are.' 
 She smiled a little contemptuously, a little sadly. 
 ' Ah, my dear ! who knows \ Death would not be so dreadful 
 to me as if I lived to incur Horace's reproach to Lyce. What 
 is it? '•'' Fh anus, et tamsn," itc, &c., though that reproach 
 perhaps belongs to a more unsophisticated age than our own. 
 Nowadays the 2)erruqniers let nobody get grey, and there are a 
 great many grandmothers, even great-grandmothers, who are 
 entirely charming — more charming than the girls who are just 
 out.' 
 
 ' I do not think you will ever go to the perruquiers, but you 
 will always be charming, and you will never be old.' 
 ' One would think you were my lover ! ' 
 ' Why will you never believe that I am still so 1 ' 
 ' Because I do not believe in any miracles ; I go to no 
 Loretto. Love is a volatile precipitate, and marriage a solvent 
 in which it disappears. If we are exceptions to that rule of 
 chemistry and life, we are so extraordinarily exceptional that 
 fate must have some dreadful punishment in store for us.' 
 'Or some exceptional reward.' 
 
 ' Is not virtue always punished I ' she said, with her enigma- 
 tical smile. ' You are a very handsome man, and have been the 
 most poetic of lovers. But in the nature of things I grow used 
 to your good looks, and in the nature of things you do not 
 make love to me any longer. Love may be the most delightful 
 thing in the world, but it cannot resist the pressure of daily 
 intercourse. It is doomed when it has to look over a common
 
 26 OTHMAR. 
 
 visiting list, and scold the same house-steward about the weekly 
 expenditure. " Ah — oiiiche, Madame I" said one of the peasants 
 at Amjot to me once, " where is love when you dip two spoons 
 in one soup-pot ? — you only quarrel about the onions." That 
 is always the fault of marriage. It is alwaj's putting two spoons 
 in one pot. Whether it is an eaithen pitcher or a Cellini vase 
 does not make the least difi'erence. Poor love runs away from 
 the clash of the spoons.' 
 
 Othmar laughed, but he was irritated. ' I should be miser- 
 able if I believed you were in earnest,' ho said impatiently. 
 'But I know you would sacrifice your own life to an epigram.' 
 
 'I am entirely in earnest,' she replied. 'But if you do not 
 believe me that shows that you are a less changeable man than 
 most, or I a wiser woman. Ah, my dear,' she added, with a 
 smile and a sigli, ' when men do not admire me any longer then 
 you will not admire me either, I imagine ; I wonder you do as 
 it is — you see so much of me I ' 
 
 'I shall adore you all my life,' said Othmar, with almost as 
 much fervour as when he had been the most impassioned and 
 the most hopeless of her lovers. 
 
 ' You fancy so ; and that is very pretty in you, after so many 
 3'ears ; but it does not follow that you will think so still in twelve 
 months' time,' said his wife, with the smile of her incui-able 
 scepticism upon her lips. 'And do not insist on it too much. 
 Things which are insisted on too much have a knack of makincj 
 themselves tiresome, and you know of old that repetition has 
 no great charm for me, and say wliat you will you cannot pre- 
 vent me from feeling that very soon I shall grow old ! ' 
 
 She rose and looked over her shoulder at the silvcr-fi-amed 
 mirror with its three glasses, showing her protilo to her as she 
 turned. 
 
 ' I could not brave the sunrise after a ball now,^ she thought, 
 with a little pang. 
 
 'Has not a poet said.' she added aloud : 
 
 I fear 
 Life's m.nny changes ; uot Death's changelesaness ? * 
 
 There was a touch of graver sadness in the tone with \\hicli 
 she quoted the line of verse, which forbade reply either by per- 
 sitlage or compliment. 
 
 Othmar kissed Jier hand with almost the same emotion as 
 ■when he had declared to her a passion hopeless, and therefore 
 for the time changeless ; and he remained mute. 
 
 ' The same poet says : 
 
 Love's words are weak, but not Love's silences,' 
 bIic added, with a smile. ' Well, I will believe you as yet.'
 
 OTHMAR. 27 
 
 She had in nowise resigned the power of, and the diversion 
 afforded her bj^, what in a lesser person woukl have been called 
 endless flirtation. She amused herself constantly with the 
 follies of men and their subjugation. 
 
 ' If you do not make yourself attractive to others, the man 
 to whom you care to be attractive will soon not find you so,' 
 she was wont to say, ' Those women who make themselves a 
 statue of tidelity, like the Queen in the "Winter's Tale," will 
 soon be left alone on their pedestals. Be as faithful as you 
 please, but show him that you have every temptation and 
 opportunity to be unfaithful if you did please.' 
 
 It was on those lines that she liad traced her conduct, and 
 whilst her world knew that she was unaltered in coquetry, if 
 coquetry her languid charm and domination could be called, 
 it also saw that she was equally unaltered in profound and 
 universal indifference to all those whom she subjugated. 
 Othmar, as he said, would have preferred that she should 
 subjugate none. But she frankly told him that it was of no 
 use to wish for. subversion of the laws of nature. ' I am as 
 nature made me,' she said once to him. ' If you did not like 
 the way I was made, why did you not leave me alone ? You 
 had plenty of time to study me. I am like Disiaeli, I like 
 power. Now the only power possible to a woman is that which 
 she possesses over men. If men were more interesting, the 
 power would be more interesting to. But then it is no!; our 
 fault. It is perhaps the fault of the millions of stupid v.'omen 
 who swallow up the occasional originality of men as sand 
 swallows up the bits of agate and cornelian on the shore. It 
 is the fashion to say that it is the wicked, clever women who 
 hurt men. That is not the case ; it is the good silly ones who 
 make of life the sahara of commonplaces and of blunders which 
 it is. Talent will at least always understand ; blameless stu- 
 pidity understands nothing.' 
 
 She was somewhat more, rather than less, of a c7iarmett.se 
 than she had been. It was so natural to her to charm the lives 
 of men that she could have as soon ceased to breathe as to cease 
 to use her power over them. There were times when Othmar 
 grew irritated and jealous, but she was unmoved by his anger. 
 
 ' It is a much greater compliment to you that men should 
 admire me,' she said to him, 'and it would look supremely 
 absurd if I lapsed into a honne hourgeuise, and always went 
 everywhere arm-in-arm with you. I .should not know myself. 
 You would not know me. Be content. You are aware that 1 
 think very little about any one of them ; they are none of them so 
 interesting as you used to be. But I must have them about 
 me. They are like my fans ; I never scarcely use a fan or look 
 at one, but still a fan is indispensable ; it is a part of one's 
 toUette.'
 
 c8 OTHMAR. 
 
 Othmar, who retained for her much of the imperious and 
 perfervid passion which he had had as a lover, resigned himself 
 with a bad grace to her arguments. Something of the old 
 tyrannical feeling with which he would once have liked to bear 
 her out of sight and hearing of the world for ever still moved in 
 him at times, though he had grown diffident of displaying it, 
 having grown afraid of her delicate ironies. 
 
 ' It is so good for him,' she said to herself ; ' that sort of 
 irritation and jealousy keeps his affections and his admirations 
 alive : they are not allowed to go to sleep, as both have a knack 
 of going to sleep in marriage. Anything is less dangerous 
 than stagnant water. If a man be not made jealous he must 
 drift imperceptibly into indifference. Monotony is like a calm 
 at sea ; everyone yawns, and in time even a shark would be 
 Avelcomed as a delightful interruption. To avoid sameness is 
 the first requisite for the endurance of love. If he love me as 
 much as he did nine years ago — and I think he does — it is only 
 because at the bottom of his heart he never feels absolutely 
 sure of me. He has always a faint unacknowledged sense that 
 I may any day do something entirely unexpected by him ; may 
 even fly away, as a bird does, off a bougli Avhich it has tired of. 
 I am like a book of alchemy to him, of which he has mastered 
 all the secrets save just one or two lines, but in wliich those 
 lines always remain in unintelligible abracadabra to perplex and 
 interest him. He will never tire of the book till he thinks he 
 can decipher those lines. It is a mistake to suppose that men 
 are only allured by their senses ; there is an intellectual 
 mystery which fascinates them, and which is not so easily 
 exhausted. All men are amused by me, all men are more or 
 less attracted by me. I should not wish my husband, alone of 
 all men, to become tired of me. Of course it is very difficult to 
 prevent it when he is so used to me, but I tliink it is possible.' 
 
 A feeble woman, a dull woman, a woman of that kind of self- 
 complacency which goes with stui)idity, would not have allowed 
 BO much even in her own thonglits ; but she, who was deemed 
 the vainest of her kind, had no such vanity wherewith to deceive 
 herself. Her high intelligence and her unerring penetration 
 were glasses forever turned upon herself no less than upon 
 others. Othmar was at times surprised and almost irritated 
 that she left him so often to go on her own visits or travels, 
 or sent him alono upon his. But she knew very well what she 
 did. 
 
 ' Frequent absences are like those pauses in the music 
 ■which in French we call siloircx, and in Gorman rauscn,^ she 
 Baid to herself. 'They make us care for the music more than 
 •we should do if it were alwaj's on our ear. IVIonotony is the 
 most terrible enemy that afioction or enjoyment ever has. Un- 
 fortunately, moat women arc so eternally monotonous that they
 
 OTHMAR. 29 
 
 can never untlerstand why men are not as pleased with the 
 defect as they are themselves. Lord Beaconsiield was not an 
 npostle of love, but he was a shrewd observer of mankind, and 
 I always think that he suggested the most admirable phase of 
 modern love possible, when he depicted two people who were 
 f-ond of one another as going their different ways every evening 
 to different houses, and meeting again to talk it all over with 
 champagne and chicken at dawn. If people are always together 
 in the same places, what have they left to tell one another in 
 their own house? Myself, I don't like either champagne or 
 chicken, but that is a mere matter of detail. You can say, 
 Rhine wine and green oysters, or yellow tea and Russian ciga- 
 rettes. It is, no doubt, only another form of vanity ; but I 
 wish our lives not to break down and drift away in little bits of 
 wreck wood, as most peoples' lives do. It is not goodness in 
 me ; it is only amour j^i'oprc.^ 
 
 She had more sympathy for him than she would in other 
 years have supposed herself capable of feeling, but with her 
 regard for him there was mingled that habit of analysis which 
 Avas so inveterate in her, and tliat indulgence to his weaknesses 
 which arose from her condescending comprehension of them. 
 She, as yet, made the preservation of his admiration her study, 
 but in her study tliero was blended the sense of amusement and 
 disdain, which always came to her before the inconsistencies and 
 tlie unwisdom of men. She loved him perhaps ; but she never 
 failed to weigh him accurately. To Yseulte, he had been as a 
 lord and a god ; to her he was dearer than other men, but not 
 more imposing. Even when the first winelike fumes of 
 awakened jjassion had touched her, she had been clear of judg- 
 ment and unerring in vision. She had said to herself : 'He 
 looked larger than others once, through the mists of my pre- 
 ference, but he is not so really.' 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 When he saw the beauty of her children, Friedrich Othmar 
 relented in that unsparing bitterness which he felt against her. 
 As a woman he still hated her intensely, unspeakably, un- 
 cliangeablj', but as their mother he had resjoect for her, and 
 almost pardon. 
 
 ' He will be childless all his days,' he had said with certainty 
 and scorn. ' That bloodless mondalnc, that ethereal coquette 
 will leave the name barren ; siie is all brain and nerve ; she 
 will never give birth to anything save an epigram.' 
 
 When his words had been disproved, he had rendered lier a 
 BuUen honour. He would take no joy in the children as ho
 
 jo OTHMAR. 
 
 would have taken joy in Yseulte's ; but they were there to bear 
 the name he thought so iirecious, and he was forced to confess 
 that no lovelier or stronger or healthier creatures than the 
 young Otho and liis sister Xenia ever could have played beneath 
 the oak-boughs of Amyot. 
 
 But the old man was faithful to the one innocent affection 
 which had ever lived in his seltish breast ; witli an aching heart 
 he would often turn from watching these children tumble 
 amongst the daisies in the sunshine, and find liis way to a 
 solitary tomb made in white marble in the mausoleum of 
 Amyot, in memory of her whose slender crushed body lay 
 buried amongst the violets by the sea of the southern shore. 
 
 'AH that weight of marble ! ' he thought, ' and not one little 
 sigh of regret ! ' 
 
 Not one ; unless he gave it. 
 
 ' I hate this Russian woman, but I am bound to say that the 
 children are beautiful,' he said once to Melville. ' I am bound 
 to say, too, that she has made a change for the better in Otho. 
 Since he has discovered (doubtless) that every cjrande jMssion has 
 its perihelion and its decline, he has become more like other 
 men. He has interested himself in the welfare of the House. 
 He has condescended to be conscious that Europe exists. He 
 has lived the natural life of the world, and has, I think, ceased 
 to wish himself a wandering Wilhelm Meister, a Fran9ois Villon 
 without a rag to his back. My poor dead child only loved him, 
 and could do nothing to attach him to life or to detach him 
 from his fantastic preoccupations and morbid demands for the 
 impossible. This woman has made him so in love with the 
 actual, with the real, that he has ceased to dream of the ideal. 
 He has even grown aware that his own fate is an enviable one, 
 which for thirty years of his life he obstinately denied.' 
 
 'It is a fjuestionable benefit to make a man abandcm the 
 ideal,' said Melville. ' I think, however, that Othmar's feeling 
 was always rather impatience of existing facts than thirst of any 
 impalpable perfection. You believe that a discontented man is 
 necessarily an imaginative man. It does not follow. Imagina- 
 tion may perhaps create discontent ; but then, on the other 
 hand, it may console it. If he had had imagination enough, he 
 would have found out a thousand idealised ways of using his 
 great wealth.' 
 
 ' Thank heaven, then, that he has so little,' said Friedrich 
 Ocinnar. ' Myself, I always considered that he had a great deal 
 too much. I do not underrate imagination in its proper place. 
 JS'one of the great events of the world would have taken place 
 without it : every great revolutionist, every great conqueror, 
 every great statestnaii, even, must i)C3ses3 it ; but it is a perilous 
 quality, singularly similar to nitro-glycerine ; you can never bo 
 certain of tlie hour ;ind the sphere of its action ; it may pierce
 
 OTHMAR. 31 
 
 a new road for liiimanity to use after it, or it may wreck nations 
 and send humanity backward by a thousand years.' 
 
 ' 1 should not mind going back a thousand yeai's,' mur- 
 mured Melville. ' Basil was living, and Augustine.' 
 
 Since the death of Yseuite these two men, so dissimilar, even 
 so inharmonious, had become in a manner friends. Their 
 mutual pain had drawn them together. The thought which 
 Avas the same in the minds of each, and which each understood 
 in the other without speech, made a link of union between 
 them. Both divined the secret of her death. Neither ever 
 spoke of it. 
 
 ' He is a priest, but he is a man,' said Friedrich Othmar of 
 IMelville, who in turn said of him : 
 
 ' He is encrusted all over with gold, egotism, and disbelief ; 
 but beneath that crust there is the heart of humanity.' 
 
 And they shook hands across the profound gulf of sentiment 
 and opinion which divided them. 
 
 ' I think that, for once, the wise Baron is mistaken,' reflected 
 IMelville, without saying his thoughts aloud. ' Othmar may 
 have grown less imaginative, because most men do as they grow 
 older, unless they be truly poets. But I do not think he is a 
 whit more contented. I believe, if he could see into his heart, 
 that he has found his ajjple of paradise not very much richer in 
 flavour than a common rennet ! ' 
 
 But he forbore to say so. What business was it of his ? 
 Only, being the profound student of the comedy and tragedy 
 of humanity that he was, he could not help feeling a keen 
 interest in watching the issues of this marriage of love. 
 
 Melville, like all persons of fine penetration and quick sym- 
 pathies, was deeply interested in all characters which were out 
 of the common lines of human nature, and whenever his busy 
 years had any leisure he spent it where he could observe all 
 those who interested him most. 
 
 Of all these the Lady of Amj^ot had the most powerful 
 interest for him. But for his years and his priest's frock, it 
 might have been a more tender and profound sentiment still 
 with which she inspired him. For Melville, as for all men of 
 intellect, the very despondency she cast over them, the very 
 intricacy and unsatisfying changeability of her character, pos- 
 sessed the most powerful charm. But Avhether these were 
 rjualities which would make hon menage in the familiarity and 
 the triviality of daily life — of this he was not so sure.
 
 32 OTHMAR. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 She, wlio had been so exacting as a friend, was not in any way 
 exacting as a wife. There were a generosity and a breadth of 
 thought in her, wliich made her accord freedom in proportion to 
 what lesser minds would have considered her right to deny it. 
 Slae held the whole ordinary mass of womanhood in too absolute 
 a disdain for her ever to stoop to the same ways and weaknesses 
 as theirs. She might have been the most despotic of mistresses: 
 she was the most lenient of wives. Tyranny, which would have 
 seemed, did still seem, to her natural and amusing when used 
 over lives which in no way belonged to her, would have 
 appeared to her bourgeois and ridiculous exercised over her hus- 
 band : that sort of thing was only fit for two shopkeepers of 
 Belleville. She had too supreme a scorn for the Penelopes of 
 the world, whose jealousy was as impotent as their charms, not 
 to let the reins which she drew so tightly over others lie loose 
 and unfelt on the shoulders of Othmar. 
 
 ' Penelope thinks that no object in all created nature is more 
 lovely and important than her distaflf ; naturally Ulysses gets 
 sick of the sight of it,' she said once. ' Why are all women, in 
 love with their husbands, much more miserable than those who 
 detest them ? Only because they insist upon giving so much of 
 themselves, that the men grow to view them with absolute 
 terror, as the Strasbourg goose views the balls of maize paste. 
 Love is an art, and ought to be dealt with artistically ; in 
 marriage, it has to contend with such insuperable dilHculties 
 that it needs to be most delicate, most sagacious, most forl)ear- 
 ing, most intelligent, to surmount them. Instead of which, 
 women, usually, who have any love for their husbands at all, 
 look on them as so much property inalienably assigned to them, 
 and treat them as Cosmo dei Medici treated Florence : *^Mi piace 
 piu didru(j(icrla die perdcrta ! " ' 
 
 Othmar himself had changed little ; men at his years do not 
 alter physically, though great changes, moral and mental, may 
 in brief time transform their feelings and their ambitions. 
 
 Women looked at him incjuisitively many a day, to try and 
 see whether that great wonder-flower of romantic passion, which 
 had astonished his world in a generati<jn in which such passions 
 are rare, had brought forth contentment or disenchantment. 
 ]>ut they couhl not be sure. No one had ever succeeded in 
 making him unfaithful to this great love, which had been 
 merged in marriage, but no one had ever penetrated his confi- 
 dence sufficiently to satisfy themselves whether any disillusion 
 liad followed on the fidtilment of those dreams and desires, to 
 which he had been willing to sacrifice his life, his honour, and
 
 OTHMAR. 33 
 
 uis soul. All that society in general, or his most familiar friends 
 could see, was the outward pageantry of a life in the great 
 woi'ld ; that life which leaves so little space for thought, so little 
 time for regret, so little leisure for conscience to speak or 
 memory to waken. If he were not entirely content he allowed 
 no one to suspect so ; and he did not even like to admit it to 
 his own reflections : yet there were times when life did not seem 
 to him much more complete than it had done before he had 
 attained the supreme desire of his heart ; there were times when 
 the old vague indefinite dissatisfaction came back to him — the 
 sense of emptiness which moved the Caesars of Rome with the 
 world at their feet. 
 
 ' I suppose it is inevita'Ble,' he said to himself. * I suppose 
 she is right ; nothing on earth is content except a sucking child 
 and an oyster.' 
 
 It irritated him that he should be pursued by this foolish 
 and shapeless sense of still missing something, still desiring 
 something, still seeking something unknown and unknowable ; 
 but it was there at the bottom of most of his thoughts, at the 
 core of most of his feelings. 
 
 ' You have had a great misfortune all your life,' Friedrich 
 Othmar said once to him. ' You have always had all your 
 wishes granted you. When a child is indulged in that way he 
 kicks his nurse, when a man is indulged in that way he sulks at 
 destiny. It is human nature.' 
 
 ' Human nature, ' said Othmar, ' according to you and Nadege, 
 is such a consummate fool that it is scarcely worth the bread it 
 eats, much less the elaboi'ate analysis which philosophers have 
 expended on it from Solomon to Renan.* 
 
 Friedrich Othmar shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 ' It is not always a fool,' he made answer ; 'but it is, I think, 
 always an ingrate.' 
 
 Was he himself an ingrate ? Or did he only suffer from that 
 inevitable law of recoil and rebound which governs human life ; 
 that cessation of tension which makes a great passion, once 
 satisfied and become familiar, like a bow unstrung ? 
 
 There is always a pathetic reaction, a curious sense of loss 
 in the midst of possession, which follows on the attainment of 
 every great desire. If anyone had told him that he was not 
 perfectly happy, he would have indignantly denied the accuracy 
 of their assertion. Whenever any misgiving that he was not 
 so arose in his own mind, he repulsed it with contempt as the 
 mere ungrateful rebelliousness of human nature. Yet now and 
 then a vague sense that his life was not much more perfect than 
 it had been before the desires of his heart had been given to hiuo, 
 occasionally came over him, though lie al\va}s thruft it away. 
 
 She herself felt sometimes an ahnost irresistible inclination 
 to say to him ; '.^nd yuu, you who set your soul on marriage
 
 34 OTHMAR. 
 
 with me, have you found the lasting joys that you expected, or 
 have you learned that the fulfilment of a dream is never quite 
 the dream itself — has always some glory wanting ? ' 
 
 But she refrained. Women are always so unwise when they 
 ask those questions, she reflected ; so like children who pull up 
 the plants in their garden to see what growth or what roots they 
 have. 
 
 ' AVe are just like anybody else, after all ! ' she did say once, 
 with a mingling of despondency and of humour. ' I suppose 
 we cannot escape from tlie age we live in, which is neither 
 original nor imaginative, nor anything that I know of, except 
 feverish and unhappy. Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, certainly, is 
 gone to live in Syria, and we might do the same, but would it 
 be any better ? Do you think life is any larger there ? I should 
 be afraid there are only more mosquitoes.' 
 
 ' I imagine we should only find in Syria what we took there, 
 as Madame de Swetchine said of Rome,' replied Othmar, with 
 some discontent. ' Life is an incomplete thing ; unsatisfactory 
 because its passions are finite, its years few, and its time of 
 slow development and of slow decline wholly disproportionate, 
 as you said just now, to its short moment of attainment and 
 maturity ; and also because habit, routine, prejudice, human 
 stupidity, have all contrived to weight it tvith unnecessary 
 burdens, to bind it with needless and intolerable laws, to take 
 all the glow and spontaneity and rebound out of it. Conven- 
 tionality is its curse.' 
 
 ' And marriage ! ' said his wife. ' Oh, my dear, I do not 
 mean to be unpleasant, but you know it is indisputably true 
 that I should have been much fonder of you, and you of me, if 
 we had never married each other. There is something stifling in 
 marriage ; it confounds love with proi)erty. I often wonder 
 how tlie human race ever contrived to make such a mistake 
 pojjular or universal.' 
 
 'It is not I who say that,' said Othmar with a touch of 
 embarrassment. 
 
 ' Oh no ; but you tliink it. Everyman thinks it,' she replied 
 tranquilly. 'I often wonder,' she continued more dreamily, 
 • how it will be when you love some other woman. You will 
 some day — of course you will. I Avonderwhat will liappen ' 
 
 ' How can you do such injustice to me and to yourself ? I 
 Bhall never care for any otlier living thing.' 
 
 She looked at him through the shadow of her drooped lids. 
 
 ' Oh yes, you will,' she repeated. * It is inevitable. The 
 only thing I am not sure about is how I shall take it. It Avill 
 all depend, I think, on whether you confide in me, or hide it 
 from me.' 
 
 'It would be a Ktrange thing to confide in you !' 
 
 ' Not at all. That is a conventional idea, and the idea of a
 
 OTHMAR. 35 
 
 Btupid man. You are not stupid. I should certainly be the 
 person most intei-ested in knowing such a fact, and if you did 
 tell me franklj'', I think — I think I should be unconventional 
 and clever enough not to quarrel with you. I think I should 
 undei'stand. But if you hid it from me, then ' 
 
 The look passed over her face which the dead Napraxinc had 
 used to fear as a hound fears the whip, and Avhich Othmar had 
 never seen. 
 
 ' Then, I give you leave to deal me any death you like with 
 your own hand,' he said with a laugh, which v.^as a little forced 
 because a certain chill had passed over him. 
 
 She laughed also. 
 
 ' Well, be wise,' she said as she rose ; ' you are warned in 
 time. Oh, my dear Otho, you grant yourself that every passion 
 is linite. I think it is ; but I think also that the wise joeople, 
 when it fades, make it leave friendship and sympathy behind it, 
 as the beautiful blowing yellow corn when it is cut leaves the 
 wheat. The foolish people let it leave all kinds of rancour, 
 envy, and uncharitableness, as the brambles and weeds when 
 they are burnt only leave behind them a foul smoke. But it is 
 so easy to be philosophic in theory ! ' 
 
 ' Your philosophy far exceeds mine,' said Othmar with a 
 little impatience. ' I have not yet reached the period at which 
 I can calmly contemplate my green April fields laid sear to give 
 corn to the millstones ; they are all in flower with the poppy 
 and the campion.' 
 
 ' Very prettily said,' replied his wife. ' You really are a 
 poet at heart.' 
 
 Othmar Avent out from her presence that day with a vague 
 sense of depression and of apprehension. 
 
 He had never wavered in his great love for her ; the great 
 passion with which she had inspired him still remained with 
 him ardent and j)rofound in much ; the charm she had for his 
 intelligence sustained the seduction for his senses ; he loved her, 
 only her, as much and as exclusively as in the early days of his 
 acfjuaintance with her ; she still remained the one woman upon 
 earth for him. He could not hear her calmly speak of any 
 future in wliich she ■would be less than then to him without a 
 sense of irritation and oflence. It seemed to him that such 
 deliberate and unsparing analysis as hers could not exist side 
 by side with any very intense feeling. Certainly he was used 
 to it in her ; he was accustomed to her delicate and critical 
 dissection of every human motive and impulse, his, her own, or 
 those of otherii ; but it touched him now with a sense of pain, 
 as though the scalpel had penetrated to some open nerve. His 
 consciousness of his own devotion to her made him indignantly 
 repulse the suggestion that he could ever change ; yet his own 
 knowledge of the nature of humanity and of the work of time 
 
 D 2
 
 36 OTHMAR. 
 
 told him that she had had truth on her side when she had said 
 that such a change might come, would come ; and he thrust the 
 consciousness of that truth away as an insult and aflront. Was 
 there nothing wliich would endure and lesist the cruel slow 
 sapping of the waves of time? Was there no union, passion, 
 or fidelity, strong enough to stand the dull fallings of the years 
 like drops of grey rain which beat down the drooping rose and 
 change it from a flower of paradise to a poor, pale, scentless 
 wreck oi itself \ 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 On this the unwelcome anniversary of her birth, she was at St. 
 Pharamond, which had been connected with the grounds of La 
 Jacquemerille by the purchase, at great cost, of all the inter- 
 vening flower-tields and olive-woods. It had been her whim to 
 do so, and Othmar liad not opposed it, though he would have 
 preferred never again to see those shores ; but, although she 
 never spoke to him on that subject, she herself chose to go 
 there with most winters, for the very reason that the world would 
 sooner have expected her to shun the scenes of Yseulte's early 
 and tragic death. She in variably did whatever her society expected 
 her not to do, and the vague sense of self-blame with wliich her 
 conscience was moved, whenever she remembered tlie dead girl, 
 was sting enough to make her display an absolute oblivion and 
 indifference which, for once, she did not feel. 
 
 She never remained long upon the Riviera ; she seldom 
 staj'ed long anywhere, except it were at Amyot ; but she went 
 thither always when the violets were thick in the vallej-s, and 
 the j'ellow blossoms of the butterwort were flung like scj many 
 golden guineas over the brown furrows of the tields. The 
 <:liildrtn spent the whole winter there. This day, when they 
 had wished her bonne fete, and brought her their great baskets 
 of white lilac and gardenias, she was indulgent to them, and 
 took tbcra with her in her carriage for a drive after her noonday 
 breakfast. She was not a woman to whom the babble and play 
 of children could ever be very long interesting ; her mind was 
 too speculative, too highly cultured, too exacting to give much 
 response to the simplicity, the ignorance, and the imperfect 
 thoughts of childhood. 13ut in her own way she loved them. 
 In her own way she took great care of their education, physical 
 and mental. She wished her son to become a man whom the 
 World would honour ; and she wished her daughter to be wholly 
 unlike herself. 
 
 As yet they were hardly more than babies ; lovely, happy, 
 gay, and gentle. ' Let tliem be young as long as they can,' she
 
 OTHMAR. 37 
 
 said to those entrusted with their training. I was never young. 
 It IS a great loss. One never wholly recovers it in any after 
 years. ' 
 
 It was a fine day, mild, sunny, with light winds shaking tlie 
 odour from the orange buds ; such a day as that on which 
 Platon Napraxine had died. She did not think of him. 
 
 Several years had gone away since then ; the whole world 
 seemed changed ; the dead past had buried its dead ; there were 
 the two golden-haired laughing children in symbol and witness 
 of the present. 
 
 ' Decidedly, however philosophic Ave may be, we are all 
 governed at heart by sentiment,' she thought, as the carriage 
 rolled through the delicate green of the blossoming woods. 
 ' And by beauty,' she added, as her eyes dwelt on the faces of 
 Otho and Xenia, who were the very flower and perfection of 
 childish loveliness ; ideal children also, who were always happy, 
 always caressing, always devoted to each other, and whose little 
 lives were as pretty as those of two harebells in a sunny wood. 
 Why were they dear to her, and sweet and charming \ Wliy had 
 the physical pain of their birth been forgotten in the mental joys 
 of tiieir possession % Why did lier eyes delight to follow their 
 movements, and her ear delight to listen to their laughter ? 
 
 The other children had been as much hers, and she had 
 always disliked them ; she disliked them still, such time as slie 
 went to their Russian home to receive their annual homage, and 
 that of all her dej^endents. 
 
 Othmar was devoted to the interests of Napraxine's two little 
 sons ; an uneasy consciousness, often recurrent to him, that he 
 had not merited the frank and steady friendship of the dead 
 man, perpetually impelled him to the greatest care of their 
 fortunes and education. They were kindly, stupid, vigorous 
 little lads, likely to grow into the image of their dead fatlier ; 
 but all that could be done for them in mind and body, for their 
 present and their future, he took heed should be done ; and 
 placing them under wise and gentle teachers, endeavoured to 
 counteract the fatal instincts to vanity and overbearing self- 
 esteem which the adulation and submission they received every- 
 where on their estates had implanted in tliem long before they 
 could spell. He never saw them come into his presence without 
 painful memories and involuntary repugnance ; but he repressed 
 all signs of either, and the children, if they feared him, liked 
 him. Of their mother they saw but very little: a lovely delicate 
 vision, in an atmosphere scented like a tea rose, with a little 
 sound in her voice which made them feel they must tread softly 
 and speak low, looked at them with an expression which they 
 did not understand, and touched them with cool fragrant lips 
 lightly and distantly, and they knew she was their mother be- 
 cause they had always heard so : but Othmar seemed nearer to
 
 38 OTHMAR. 
 
 them than she did, and when they wished for anything, it was 
 to him that they addressed their little rude scrawled notes. For 
 the rest, they were always in Russia : it was the only stipulation 
 Avith which their father had hampered their mother's guardian- 
 ship of them. 
 
 'Let them be Russians always,' he had said in his last letter 
 to her. ' Let them love no soil but Russia. The curse of 
 Russians is the foreign life, the foreign tongue, the foreign 
 ways, which draw them away from their people, make their 
 lands unknown and indifierent to them, and lead them to 
 squander on foreign cities and on foreign wantons the roubles 
 wrung by their stewards in their absence from their dependents. 
 Paris is the siiccurscde of Petersburg, and it is also its hell. 
 When the Russian nobles shall live in their own homes, the 
 Niliilist will have little justification, and the Jew will be unable 
 to drain the peasantry as a cancer drains the blood. I preach 
 what I have not practised. But if I could live my life again, I 
 would spend my strength, and my gold, and my years amongst 
 my own people.' 
 
 ' Poor Platon ! ' she had thought, more than once remember- 
 ing those words. ' He thinks he would have done so, but he 
 would not. The first druUsse who should have crossed the 
 frontier would have taken him back with her in triumph. It is 
 quite true what he says ; an absent nobility leaves an open door 
 behind them, through which Sedition creeps in to jump upon 
 their vacant chairs. But so long as ever they have the power, 
 men will go where they are amused, and tlie Russian tchin will 
 not stay in the provinces, in the snow, with the wolves, and the 
 Jews, and the drunken villagers all around his house, when ho 
 can live in the Avenue Josephine, and never hear or see any- 
 thing but what pleases him. Absenteeism ruined Ireland, and 
 will ruin Russia ; but, tant que le monde est mowle, the man 
 who has only one little short life of his own will like to enjoy 
 it.' 
 
 Nevertheless, she and Othmar both rcs]>ected his wishes, 
 and his boys were brouglit up in the midst of the vast lands of 
 their heritage, with everything done that could be done by 
 tuition to amend their naturally slow intelligence and outweigh 
 the stubbornness and arrogance begotten by centuries of abso- 
 lute dominion in the race they sprang from. She herself only 
 saw them very rarely, when, in midsummer weather, the tlowei'- 
 ing seas of gra-ss and the scent of the violets in the larch woods 
 brought life and warmth even to North-eastern Russia. They 
 were unpleasant to her : always unpleasant. They were tho 
 living and intru.sivc records of years she would willingly have 
 effaced. They were involuntary but irresistible reproaches 
 spoken, as it were, by lips long dumb in death. 
 
 Living, their father had never had power to do othenviso
 
 OTHMAR. 39 
 
 than offend, irritate, and disgust hei* : the least active senti- 
 ment against himself that he had ever roused in her had been a 
 contemptuous pity. But dead, there were moments when 
 Platon Najiraxine acquired both dignity and strength in her 
 eyes : the silence of his death and its cause had commanded her 
 respect : he had been wearisome, stupid, absurd, troublesome, 
 in all his life; but in his deatli he had gained a certain grandeur, 
 as features quite coarse and commonplace will look solemn and 
 wliite on tlieir bier. 
 
 He had died to defend her name, and she could not re- 
 member ever once having given him one kind word ! There 
 had been a greatness in his loyalty and in his sacrifice to its 
 demands which outweighed the clumsiness of his passion and 
 the grotesqueness of his ignorance. 'If he wei^e living again, I 
 should be as intolerant of him as I ever was,' she thought at 
 times ; ' he would annoy me as much as ever, he would be as 
 ridiculous, he would be as odious ; and yet I should like for 
 once to be able to say to him " Pauvre ours ! vous etes mat leche, 
 mais vous avez bon cceur! " ' 
 
 It was a A'ague remorse, but a sincere one ; yet in her nature 
 it irritated and did not alter her. It was an intrusive thought, 
 and unwelcome as had been his presence. She thrust it away 
 as she had used to bid her Avomen lock the doors of her cham- 
 ber ; and the poor ghost went away obediently, timid, wistful, 
 not daring to insist, as the living man had used to do from the 
 street door. 
 
 Remorse is a vast persistent shadow in the poet's metrical 
 romance and the dramatist's tragic story ; but in the great world, 
 in the pleasant world, in the world of movement, of distraction, 
 of society, it is but a very faint mist, which at very distant 
 intervals clouds some tiny space in a luminous sky, and hurries 
 away before a breath of fashion, a whisper of news, a puff of 
 novelty, as though conscious of its own incongruity and want of 
 tact. 
 
 When their drive was over this day she dismissed the young 
 Otho and his sister to their nurses and teachers, and remained 
 on the sea-terrace of St. Pharamond with some friends about 
 her. It was the last day in February, a day of warm winds and 
 full sunshine and fragrant wai-mth. Tlie air was penetrated 
 with the sweet breath of primroses and the scented narcissus 
 which were blossoming by millions under tlie woods of St. 
 Pharamond. The place had been beautiful before, and under 
 her directions had become as perfect a sea palace as the south 
 coast of Europe could show anywhere. She had had a terrace 
 made ; a long line of rose-coloured marble overhanging the sea, 
 backed by palms and araucarias, with sheltered seats that no 
 angry breeze could find out, and wide staircases descending to 
 the smooth sands below. Here, lying on the cushions and white
 
 40 OTJIMAR. 
 
 bearskins, and leaning one elbow on the balustrade, she could 
 ■watch all the width of the waters as they stretched eastward and 
 westward, and see the manoeuvres in the cupraces of her friends' 
 vessels witliout moving from her own garden. To the sea- 
 teri'ace, when it was known that she would receive them, came, 
 on such sunny afternoons as this, all those whom she deigned 
 to encourage of the pleasure- seekers on the coast. 
 
 To see the sun set from that rose- marble terrace, and to take 
 a Russian cigarette or a cup of caravan tea beneath those arau- 
 caria branches, was the most coveted distinction and one of the 
 surest brevets of fashion in the world. She refused so many ; 
 she received so few ; she was so inexorable in her social laws ; 
 mere rank alone had no weight Avith her ; ambassadors could 
 pass people to courts, but nou up those rose-coloured stairs ; 
 princes and princesses, if they were dull, had no chance to be 
 made welcome ; and, in fine, to become an habitue there required 
 so many perfections that the majority of the great world never 
 passed the gates at all. 
 
 ' The first qualification for aduiittance is that they must find 
 something new to say every day,' she said to the Due de Bethune, 
 who was in an informal way her first chamberlain. ' The second 
 is, that they must always amuse me.' 
 
 'The first clause a few might perhaps fulfil; but who shall 
 attain to fulfilment of the second ? ' 
 
 ' That will remain to be seen,' she said with a little yawn, 
 while she reclined on the white furs and the Eastern tissues, her 
 feet on a silver globe of hot water and her hands clasped idly 
 on a tortoiseshell field-glass. It was five o'clock ; the western 
 sky was a burning vault of rose and gold ; the zenith had the 
 deep di\4ne blue that is like nothing else in all creation ; the 
 sea was radiant, purple here, azure there, opal elsewhere, as 
 the light fell on it; delicate winds blew across it violet-scented 
 from the land ; the afternoon sun was warm, and as its light 
 deejjcncd made the pale rose of the marbles glow like the Hoovers 
 of a poiucgranatc tree. She forgot her companions ; she leaned 
 her head against her cushions and dreamily thought of many 
 things ; of the day she had first come thither most of all. It 
 had licen nine years before. 
 
 Isine years ! — what an eternity ! She remembered the 
 bouquet which Othmar had given her on the head of the sea- 
 stairs. What a lover he had been ! — a lover out of a romance — 
 Lelio, Ruy ]Jlas, Ivomeo — anything you would. What a pity to 
 have married him ! It had been commonplace, hanal, stupid — 
 anybody would have done it. Tiicre had been a complete absence 
 of originality in such a conclusion to their story. 
 
 If Laura had nuirried I'etrarca, who would have cared for 
 the sonnets ? 
 
 She liiuglied a little as she thought so. Her companions
 
 OTIIMAR. 41 
 
 hoped they had succeeded in amusing her. She had not heard 
 a word they were saying. Slic gazed dreamily at the sea through 
 her eyehds, which looked sliut, and pursued her own reflec- 
 tions. 
 
 Her companions of tlie moment were all men ; the most 
 notable of them were Melville, tlie Due de Bethune, and a 
 Russian, Loris Loswa. 
 
 Melville, on the wing between Rome and Paris, loitered a 
 week or two in Nice, doing his best to shake alms for good 
 works out of the sinners there, and lifting up the silver clarion 
 of his voice against the curse of the tripot with unsparing 
 denxniciation. 
 
 The Due de Bethune was there because for twelve years of 
 his still young life he had been uneasy Avhenever many miles 
 were between him and the face of his lady, whom he adored 
 with the hopeless and chivalrous passion of which he had sus- 
 tained the defence at the Court of Love at Amyot. He would 
 have carried her muti' or her ribbon to the scaffold, like d'Aubiac 
 and Montmorin, whom he had cited there. He had been 
 almost the only one of her lovers whom she had deigned to take 
 the trouble to preserve as a friend. He had been inspired at 
 first sight with an intense passion for her, which had coloured 
 and embittered some of the best years of his life. On the death 
 of Napraxine he had been amongst the first to lay the ofler of 
 his life at her feet. She had rejected him, but without her 
 customary mockery, even with a certain regret ; and she had 
 employed all the infinite power of her charms and tact of her 
 intelligence to I'etain him as a companion whilst rejecting him 
 as a suitor. Such a position had seemed at first impossible to 
 him, and had been long painful ; but at last he chose rather to 
 see her on those distant terms than never, and gradually, as time 
 passed on, he grew familiarised to the sight of her as the wife 
 of Othmar, and the love he bore to her softened into regard, 
 and lost its sting and its torment. 
 
 In person he was handsome and distinguished-looking to a 
 great degree; he resembled tlie portrait of Henri Quatre, and bore 
 himself like the fine soldier he was ; he had a grave tempera- 
 ment and a romantic i'ancy ; the cradle of his race was a vast 
 dark fortress overhanging tlie iron-bound rocks of Finisterre, 
 and his early manhood had been ushered in by the terrible 
 tragedies of the annee terrible. As volunteer with the Army of 
 the North, Gui de Bethune had seen the darkest side of war and 
 life ; he had been but a mere youth then, but the misfortunes 
 of his country had added to the natural seriousness of his 
 northern temper. The most elegant of gentlemen in ih.e great 
 ■world of Paris, he yet had never abandoned himself as utterly 
 as most men of his age and rank to the empire of pleasure ; 
 there was a certain reserve and dignity in him which became
 
 42 or H MAR 
 
 the cast of his features and tlie gravity and sweetness of his 
 voice. 
 
 But he never loved any other woman. And unconsciously 
 to herself she was so used to consider that implicit and ex- 
 clusive devotion to her as one of her rights, that she would have 
 been astonislied, even i:)erhaps annoyed, had she seen that he 
 took his worship elsewhere. Her remembrance had spoiled 
 twelve years of the promise of his manhood, but if anyone had 
 reproached her with that, she would have said sincerely enough, 
 'I cannot help his adoring me.' She would have even taken 
 credit to herself for the unusual kindliness with which she had 
 endeavoured to turn the sirocco of love into the mild and harm- 
 less breeze of friendly sympathy. 
 
 The Due de Bethuno was one of those conquests which 
 flattered even her sated and fastidious vanity ; and she had been 
 touched to unwonted feeling by the delicate, chivalrous, and 
 lofty character of the loyalty he gave her so long. 
 
 She jested at him often, but she respected him always ; 
 occasionally she irritated Othmai by saying to him, half in joke 
 and half in earnest : 
 
 ' Sometimes I almost wish that I had married Bethune ! ' 
 
 That he remained unmarried for hei sake was always 
 agreeable to her. 
 
 Loris Loswa was, on the contrary, one of the gayest of her 
 many servitors. By birth noble and poor, he had been early 
 compromised in a students' revolt at Kieff, and through family 
 influence had been allowed self-exile instead of deportation to 
 Tobolsk. He had turned his steps to Paris, and, possessing 
 great facility for art, had pursued the study seriously .and so 
 successfully, that befoi-e he was thirty he had become one of the 
 most noted artists in France. 
 
 He had a wonderful talent for the portraiture of women. 
 No one rendered with so much grace, so mucli charm, so much 
 delicate flattery, running deftly in the lines of truth, the pecu- 
 liar beauties of the mondaine, in which, however much nude 
 nature may have done, art always does still more. All that 
 subtle, indescribable loveliness of the woman of society, which 
 is made up of so many details of tint and costume, and manner 
 and style, and a thousand other subtle indescribable things, 
 was cau'^ht and flxed by the brush or by the crayon of Loris 
 Loswa with a power all his own, and a fldelity which became 
 the most cliarming of compliments. Ruder artists, truer per- 
 haps to art than lie, gnimbled at his method and despised his 
 renown. 'Faiscnr de chiffons^ some students wrote once ujion 
 his door ; and there were many of his brethren who pretended 
 tliat his creations were nothing more than audacious, and un- 
 really brilliant, trickeries. 
 
 But detraction did not Lick the wheels of hia triumphal
 
 CTHMAR. 43 
 
 chariot ; it glided along with inconceivable rapidity through the 
 pleasant avenues of popular admiration. And his art pleased 
 too many connoisseurs of elegant taste and cultured sight not to 
 have in it some higher and finer qualities than his enemies 
 allowed to it. He had magical colouring, and as magical a 
 touch ; a woman's portrait, under his treatment, became gor- 
 geous as a sunbird, delicate as an orchid, ethereal as a butterfly 
 floating down a sunbeam. Then he was at times arrogant in 
 his pretensions, fastidious in his selections of sitters ; he was 
 given to call himself an amateur, which at once disarmed his 
 critics and increased his vogue ; he was an aristocrat, and very 
 good-looking, which did not diminish his popularity with any 
 class of women ; and wliat increased it still more was, that lie 
 refused many more sitters than he accepted. Not to have been 
 painted in water colours, or drawn in pastel by Count Loris 
 Loswa, was to any elegante to be a step behindhand in fashion ; 
 to have a pearl missing from her crown of distinction. 
 
 ' If anyone could paint dew on a cobweb it would be Loswa,' 
 a great critic had said one day. ' Have you never seen dew on 
 a cobweb ? It is the most beautiful thing in the world, espe- 
 cially when a sunbeam trembles tlirough it.' 
 
 His present hostess had a high opinion of his powers, 
 mingled with a certain depreciation of them. ' Perhaps it is 
 only a trick,' she admitted ; ' but it is a divine trick^a trick of 
 Hermes.' 
 
 He leaned now over the balustrade of the terrace of St. 
 Pharamond, the warmth of the western sun shining on his fair 
 curls and straight profile. 
 
 ' A coxcomb can never be a genius,' murmured the Due de 
 Bethune, glancing towards him with sovereign contempt and 
 dislike. 
 
 ' You are always very j^ortc against poor Loris,' returned his 
 hostess Avith a smile. ' Yes, he has genius in a way, the same 
 sort of genius that Watteau liad, and Coustou and Boucher ; he 
 should have been born under Louis Quinze ; that is his only 
 mistake.' 
 
 'He is a coxcomb,' repeated Be'thune. 
 
 * He seems so to you, because all your life has been fdled 
 with grave thoughts and strong actions. All artists are apt to 
 seem mere triflers to all soldiers. Who is that mrl he is looking 
 at ? — what a handsome face ! ' 
 
 She raised herself a little on her elbow, and looked down 
 over the balustrade ; a small boat with a single red sail and two 
 women under it were passing under the terrace ; one of them 
 was old, brown and ugly, the other was young, fair, and with 
 golden-brown hair curling under a red woollen fisher's cap. 
 The water was shallow under the marble walls of St. Phara- 
 mond ; the boat was drifting very slowly ; there was a ijile of
 
 44 OTHMAR. 
 
 oranges and lemons in it as its cargo ; the elder woman, with 
 one oar in the watei", was with her other hand counting copper 
 coins into a leathern bag in her lap ; the younger, who steered 
 with a string tied to her foot, was managing the sail with x 
 practised skill which showed that all maritime exercises were 
 famiUar to her. When slie sat down again she looked up at 
 the terrace above her. 
 
 She had a beautiful and uncommon countenance, full of 
 light ; the light of youth, of health, of enjoyment ; she wore \ 
 gown of rough dark-blue sca-stiiff much stained with salt water, 
 and the sleeves of it were rolled up high, showing the whole of 
 her bare and admirably moulded arms. The memories of 
 Melville and of his hostess both went back to the day when 
 they had seen another b(jat upon those waters with the happy 
 loveliness of youth within it. 
 
 Loris Loswa, full of outspoken admiration, exhausted all his 
 epithets of praise as he watched the little vessel drift by them, 
 slowly, very slowly, for there was no wind to aid it, and the oar 
 was motionless in the water. 
 
 ' Stay, oh stay !' he cried to the boat, and began to murmur 
 
 the ' Enfant, si j'e'tais roi ' 
 
 ' If you were a king you could hardly do better than what, 
 I am quite sure, you will do as it is,' said Nadine. ' Find out 
 where she lives, and make her portrait for next year's Salon. 
 She is very handsome, and that old scarlet cap is charming. Let 
 us recompense her for passing, and astonish her.' 
 
 As she spoke she drew a massive gold bracelet off her own 
 arm, and leaning farther down over the marble parapet, threw 
 it towards the girl. Her aim was good ; the boat was almost 
 motionless, the bracelet was very weighty ; it fell with admir- 
 able precision where it was intended to fall— on the knees of 
 the girl as she sat in the prow behind the pile of golden fruit. 
 
 ' How astonished and pleased she will be ! ' said Loswa. ' It 
 is only you, Madame, who liave such apropos inspirations.' 
 
 Even as he spoke the maiden in the boat had taken up the 
 bracelet, looked at it a moment with a frown upon her face, then 
 without a second's pause had sprung to her feet to obtain a 
 better attitude for her effort, and with a mxgniticont sweep of 
 her bare arm upward and backward cast the thing back again 
 on high on to the balustrade, where it rolled to the feet of its 
 mistress. 
 
 Without waiting an instant, she plucked the oars up, one 
 from the hand of the old woman the other from the bottom of 
 the boat, and with vigorous strokes drove her sluggish old 
 vessel past the terrace wall, never once looking up, and not 
 heeding the cries of her companion. In a few moments, tinder 
 her fierce swift movements, the boat was several yards away, 
 leaving the shallow water for the deeper, and liidden altogether
 
 OTHMAR 45 
 
 from the gaze of her admirers by the red sail flaked with amber 
 and bistre stains, where wind, and sun, and storm had marked 
 it for their own. 
 
 ' What has happened ? ' said Melville, who had not under- 
 stood the episode of the bracelet, rising and coming towards 
 them. 
 
 'We are in Arcadia, Monsignor!' cried Nadine. ' A pea- 
 sant girl rejects a jewel ! ' 
 
 ' Is she a peasant ? I should doubt it,' said Be'thune. 
 
 Melville looked through one of the spy-glasses. 
 
 ' No, no ! It is Damaris Berarde,' he said as he laid it aside. 
 ' She is by no means a peasant. She is a great heiress in her 
 own little way, and as proud as if she were dauphine of 
 France.' 
 
 ' Damaris ! What a pretty name ! ' said Loswa. ' It makes 
 one think of damask roses, and she is rather like one. Where 
 does she live, Monsignor ? ' 
 
 ' She lives with her grandfather on a little island which 
 belongs to him. He is a very well-to-do man, but a great brute 
 in many ways ; he is not cruel to the girl, but were she to cross 
 his will I imagine he would be. Krapotkine is liis hero and 
 Karl Marx his prophet ; he is the most ferocious anarchist. 
 You know the sort of man. It is a sort very common in France, 
 and especially so in the South. Did you give her a jewel, 
 Madame Nadege ? Ah, that was a very great oflence ! She 
 must have been mortally offended. When that child is en fete 
 she has a roAV of pearls as big as any in your jewel-cases.' 
 
 ' She looked a poor girl, and I thought I should please her,' 
 said Nadine, with impatience. ' Who was to tell that the 
 owner of pearls as big as sparrows' eggs was rowing in a fruit- 
 boat, bare-armed and bare-headed l ' 
 
 ' Where did you say that she lived ] ' asked Loswa, curious 
 and interested. 
 
 ' Oh, on an island a long way off from here,' said Melville, 
 regretting that he had spoken of this source of dissension. 
 
 ' Take me to that island, JMonsignor,' murmured Loris 
 Loswa in his ear. 
 
 'Oh, indeed no,' said the priest hastily. 'You are a 
 "cursed aristocrat;" the old man would receive you with a 
 thrust of a pike.' 
 
 'I would take my chance of the pike,' said Loswa, 'and I 
 would assure him that the future lies with the Anarchists, for I 
 believe it, and I would not add that I also think that their millen- 
 nium will be most highly uncomfoi-table.' 
 
 ' Will you take me to that island, Monsignor 1 ' said Nadine. 
 ' It will not be favourable to fashionable impressionists like 
 Loris.' 
 
 Loswa coloured a little with irritation ; he had not thought
 
 46 OTHMAR. 
 
 she would overhear his request. He was, besides, despite his 
 vanity, always vaguely sensible that her admiration of his 
 powers was tinged with contempt. 
 
 ' You, Madame ! ' cried Melville, cordially wi.sliing that the 
 island of Damaris Berarde was far away in the Pacitic in lieu of 
 a score of leagues off tlie shores of Savoy. ' Would I take the 
 world incarnate, the most seductive and irresistible of all its 
 votaries, into a convent of Oblates to torture all the good 
 Sisters condemned to eternal seclusion? That poor little girl is 
 a little recluse, a little barbarian, but she is happy in lier soli- 
 tude, in her scntvagerie. Were she once to see the Countess 
 Othmar she would know peace no more.' 
 
 ' She must see many very like me if she live a mile or so off 
 these shores,' said Nadine, dismissing the subject with indiffe- 
 rence. ' 1 am sure it is she who is to be envied if she can hnd 
 any entertainment in rowing about in a boat full of oranges. 
 I would do it this moment if it would amuse me, but it would 
 not. That is the penalty of having sophisticated and corrupted 
 tastes. How old is your paragon I ' 
 
 ' Did I say she was a paragon ? She is a good little girl. 
 Her age ? I should think fifteen, sixteen ; certainly not more. 
 Her birth is rather curious. Her mother was an actress, and 
 her father the master of a fruit-carrying brig ; dissimilar enougli 
 progenitors. Her father was drowned, and her mother died of 
 nostalgia for the stage ; and Damaris was left to the care of 
 her grandfather, the tierce old Communist I have desoriljed to 
 you. However, he is not so terrible a bigot after all, for he 
 allowed her to be taught by the Sisters at the Villefranche 
 Convent, as a concession to me when I knew him first, in return 
 for a little service I had done him. He thinks it docs not much 
 matter what women do ; to him they are only beasts of burden ; 
 he likes to see his hung with pearls only as he puts tassels and 
 ribbons on his cows when they are taken to market.' 
 
 ' And Avliat service did you render him ? ' 
 
 'Oh, nothing worth mentioning; a trifle,' said Melville, 
 who never spoke of his own deeds of heroism, which were 
 many. The old man's younger and only remaining son liad 
 lain dj'ing of Asiatic cholera, brought to the coast in some in- 
 fected load of Eastern rags, witli which they had manured tlie 
 olives one hot August day. Not a soul had dared to approach 
 the plague-stricken bed, except the courtly churchman whose 
 smile was so sought by great ladies and whose wit was so prized 
 at dinner-parties. He had not abandoned it until all was over, 
 and with his own hands liad aided Jean Berarde to lay the body 
 of his boy in mother-earth. Wjiea the grave was filled up, the 
 old socialist, to whom priests had been as loathliest vermin, 
 gave his knotted work-worn hand to the slender white hand of 
 Melville :
 
 OTHMAR. 47 
 
 ' The only one that had the courage ! ' he muttered. ' Do 
 not try to do anything with me, it would be no use ; but do 
 what you like about the child. I will say nothing. You alone 
 stayed by me to see her uncle die.' 
 
 So the girl Damaris had been allowed to go in her boat to 
 learn of the Sisters on the mainland, and had been allowed to 
 go also to Mass on high days and lioly days. But Melville saw 
 no necessity to say all this to his worldly friends upon the sea- 
 terrace of St. Pharamond. Nay, he even reproached himself 
 that, in a momentaiy unconsidered impulse, he had given the 
 name of the girl to Loswa. Loswa was not perhaps a man to 
 go in cold blood on a seducer's errand, but he was conceited, 
 sensual, egotistic, and accustomed to take his own way without 
 much consideration for its consequences, whether to himself or 
 to others. And the worldly wisdom of Melville told him he 
 had committed an imprudence. 
 
 ' Jean Berarde,' he continued, ' of course, abhors priests, 
 and would have a general massaci-e of the Church. But I 
 chanced to do him a service, as I said, some time ago, and so he 
 allows me now and then to go and sit under his big olives ar<l 
 talk to the child, and even, grudgingly, lets her go to Mass now 
 and then. His past is written clearly enough in the history of 
 Savoy, but he either does not know or does not care anything 
 about his descent. All he does care about are his profits from 
 olives and oranges, and also, I suspect, from smuggling. What 
 is infinitely droll is, that the principles which slew his fore- 
 fathers and destroyed the cradle of his race have become his 
 own. Perhaps the fury of the (^a ira got into him, being be- 
 gotten, as he was, in that time of blood and flame through 
 which his jirogenitors passed. Anyhow he is the fiercest of 
 socialists now. 
 
 ' The Counts de la Berarde were very miglify people ; almost 
 as great as their suzerains and neighbours, the Counts of Dau- 
 phine. The cradle of their race, of which you may see one 
 tower standing now, was set amongst the glaciers and gorges of 
 the Val St. Christophe ; it stood alcove the Romanclie on a 
 great slope of gneiss, with the snow mouritains at its back. Up 
 to the time of Richelieu the Be'rardes were omnipotent, and they 
 had sway as far down as the sea coast, and it is said that sea 
 piracy, as well as stoppage of land travellers going on their 
 horses and sumpter mules through the passes, swelled their 
 wealth and their power not a little. All these mountain lords 
 were robbers in those days. If you have never been up as far 
 as the St. Christophe valley, you should go as soon as the 
 weather opens and the roads are passable ; all the cols and the 
 combes are fine, well worth a little Alpine clinibing ; and the 
 Pointe des Ecrins may hold its own with the jieaks of the 
 Engadine.
 
 48 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' Well, to revert to the Counts de Berarde : Richelieu broke 
 the back of their power — it is odd that a Churchman, doing all 
 he could to strengthen the hands of a king, did in truth lay the 
 first stone of what became centuries after the Revolution ! — 
 their chiefs were beheaded on the ramparts of Briangon, their 
 castle in the Alps was razed, and only two or three of their 
 younger scions survived the general destruction of the race. 
 From one of these distant branches, Jean de la Berarde, who 
 had a small stronghold on the sea, and who became, by all these 
 executions, the head of the family, this old man who owns 
 Bonaventure, and is the rudest and roughest of cruisers and 
 farmers, is lineally descended, I have been at pains to make 
 out his genealogy. These matters always have interest for me, 
 and it is curious to trace how the old patrician strain comes out 
 in the girl, his grand-daughter, though he himself is nothing 
 more than a boor. The Berardes never recovered the mas- 
 sacres and confiscations of the reign of Louis XIII., though they 
 were small suzerains on the sea- coast up to the days of Louis XV. 
 They then fell into poverty, and lost their hold over their 
 neighbours ; the Terror extinguished them entirely ; they were 
 swallowed up in the night of anarchy. But Jean Berarde of 
 Bonaventure is legally heir of the Count Alain de la Berarde, 
 who was taken to Toulon, and shot there by the Maratists of 
 Freron and Barras. His only son, being a lad at the time, was 
 saved by disguising himself as a fisherman, and, being utterly 
 beggared by the Jacobins, took to tlie coasting trade, and in 
 time saved money, married a peasant, and bought the island : 
 my socialist friend was his son. 
 
 ' That is the story of these people, who in two generations 
 have dropped the very memory of the fierce nobles they sprang 
 from so entirely that the old man on Bonaventure is as rabid a 
 Communist as any man can be who has property and clings to 
 it. There — I have been terribly prosy, and Madame will say 
 that all this genealogy is of no earthly interest to her ; and, 
 indeed, it cannot be to any of you, only that to a student of 
 human nature it is always, in a measure, interesting to see how 
 old races look under new hoods.' 
 
 'In this instance,' said Nadine smiling, ' the old race looks 
 very pretty inider the Phrygian cai>. The girl is unusually 
 handsome. You would be wild to paint her, Loswa, if only she 
 were a duchess ! ' 
 
 ' I would ask no better fate as it is,' he replied. * But per- 
 haps it miglit not be so easy. The grandfatlier Berarde is sure 
 to be a Cerberus.' 
 
 'You must air your dtsti active df)ctrine3 before hiin ; he 
 will be fascinated ; he will not know that you live witli the 
 duchesses, and would not trouble yourself actually to walk th^ 
 length of a boulevard to save All The Ru.ssias.'
 
 OTHMAR. 49 
 
 • I am not a political hypocrite, Madame, though you are 
 pleased to ridicule me as an artistic impostor,' said Loswa, with 
 an angry flush on his face. 
 
 She cast the end of her cigarette into the sea, 
 
 ' Oh no ; you are not a hypocrite ; you would very much 
 like to see the destruction of the whole world, provided only 
 that your own armchair should withstand the shock. There 
 are so many anarchists of that type ; and, indeed, why should 
 you die for politics or creed when you can live and paint such 
 charming pictures % For your pictures are very charming, 
 though they are all pearl-powder and point-lace, all satins and 
 brocades, and we are all going to Court in every one of them.' 
 
 ' Vandyke did not paint beggars,' said Loswa, who would 
 have lost his temper had he dared. 
 
 She looked at him with amusement. 
 
 ' But you are not Vandyke, my dear Loris ; you are, at 
 most, Lely or Boucher, and the pearl-powder has got into your 
 brushes a little more than it should have done. You have only 
 one defect as an artist, but it is a capital olience, and you will 
 not outgrow it — you are neuer naturall ' 
 
 He was silent from vexation. 
 
 He had an exaggerated opinion of his own genius, and saw 
 in himself a mingling of Clouet and Boucher, Leonardo and 
 Largilliere, and was otten restless and nervous under his sense 
 of her depreciative criticism ; but he was very proud of the 
 intimacy he was allowed to enjoy with her, and usually bore 
 her chastisement with a si:)aniel's humility ; a quality rare in 
 him, spoilt and courted darling of high dames as he was. 
 
 ' If you do take a portrait of that child,' she pursued, point- 
 ing to the distant boat, ' you will be utterly unable to portray 
 her as she is ; you will never give the sea-stains on her gown, 
 the sea-tan on her face, the rough dull red of that old Avorn 
 sea-cap. You will idealise her, which with you means that you 
 will make her utterly artificial. She will become a goddess of 
 liberty, and she will look like a maid of honour frisking under 
 a republican disguise to amuse a frisky Court. The simple 
 sea-born creature yonder, rowing through blue water, and 
 thinking of the sale of her oranges or the capture of her fish, 
 will be altogether and forever beyond you. It is always beyond 
 the Lelys and the Bouchers, though it would not have been 
 beyond Vandyke. Do you think you could paint a forest-tree 
 or a tield-flower ? Not you ; your daisy would become a gar- 
 denia, and your larch would be a lime on the boulevards.' 
 
 ' Am I to understand, Madame, that you have suddenly 
 become a patroness of nature ? Then surely even I, poor 
 creature of the boulevards though I be, need not despair of 
 becoming natUrlich ? ' 
 
 *You mistake,' said Nadine with a little sadnesa. 'I have
 
 50 OTHMAR. 
 
 lived in a hothouse, but 1 have always envied those who lived 
 in the open air. Besides, I am not an artist ; I am a mere 
 viomlainc. I was bom in the world as an oyster is in its slial- 
 lows. But an artist, if he be Avorthy the name, should ablior 
 the world. He should live and work and think and dream in 
 tlie open air, and in full contact with nature. Do you suppose 
 Millet could have breathed an hour in j'our studio with its 
 velvets and tapestries and lacquer work, with its draperies and 
 screens and rugs, and carefully shaded Avindows ? He Avould 
 liave been stiMcd. "Why is nearly all modern work so valueless ? 
 Because it is nearly all of it studio-work ; work done at high 
 pressure and in an artificial light. Do you think that INIichel 
 Angelo could have endured to dwell in Cromwell Iload 1 Or do 
 you think that INIurillo or Domenichino would have built them- 
 selves an liotel in the Avenue Yilliersl Why is Basil Verescha- 
 guin, with all his faults and deformities, original and in a way 
 sublime 1 Because he works in the open air ; in no light tem- 
 pered otherwise than by the clouds as tliey pass, or by the 
 leaves as they move.' 
 
 ' For heaven's sake ! ' cried Loswa with a gesture of appeal. 
 
 She laughed a little. 
 
 ' All, my poor Court poodle, with your pretty tricks and 
 graces ! — of course, the very name of our wolf of the forests is 
 terrible to you. But I suppose the Court has made the poodle what 
 he is ; I suppose it is as much your duchesses' fault as your own.' 
 
 Tlicn slie turned away and left this favourite of fortune and 
 great ladies to his own reflections. They were irritated and 
 mortified ; bitter with that bitterest of all earthly things, 
 wounded vanity. 
 
 Good heavens ! he thought, with a sharp stinging sense of a 
 woman's base ingratitude, was it for this that he had painted 
 her portrait in such wise that season after season each succeed- 
 ing one had been the centre of all eyes in the Paris Salon ] 
 Was it for this that he had immortalised her face looking out 
 from a cloud of shadow like a narcissus in the mists of March ] 
 — that he had drawn her in every attitude and every costume, 
 from the loose white draperies of her hours of langour to the 
 golden tissues and crowding jewels of her court-dress at imperial 
 palaces? Was it fortius that he had composed that divinest 
 portrait of them all, in which, A\ith a knot of stephanotis at her 
 breast .and a collar of pearls at her tliroat, she seemed to smile 
 at all who looked on her that slight, amused, disdainful smile 
 wliich had killed men as surely as any silver-hilted dagger lying 
 in an ivory case, which once was steeped in aqua Tufarui for 
 Lucrezia or Bianca .' Was it for this ! — to be called oppro- 
 brious, derisive names, and have Basil Vereschaguin, the 
 painter of death, of carnage, of horror, of brown Hindoos and 
 hideous Tartars, vaunted before him as his master 1
 
 OTIIMAR. 51 
 
 He hated Vereschnguin as a Sevres vase, had it a mind and 
 Eonl to hate, might hate the bronze statue of a gladiator ; and 
 ]iis tormentor, in a moment of mercilessness and candour, liad 
 wounded liim with a weapon whose use he never forgave. 
 
 ' He is a coxcomb ! Bethune is quite riglit,' she said of him 
 when Melville hinted that she had been too cruel. ' He has 
 marvellous talent and tcclmique, but he dares to think that these 
 two arc genius. If he had not likened himself to Vandyke I 
 might perhaps never have told him what I tliink of liis place 
 in art. He is a pretty painter, a very pretty painter, and his 
 portraits of me are charming ; but if they be looked at at all in 
 the twentieth century they will hardly rank higher than we 
 rank now the pastels of Rosalba ; certainly not higher than we 
 rank the portraits of Greuze.' 
 
 ' If I were a painter I would be content to be Greuze,' said 
 Melville with a smile. 
 
 ' No j^ou would not,' said Nadine ; ' you would not be con- 
 tent to be a d'Estrecs in your own profession, nor any other 
 mere Court cardinal.' 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The following morning Loris Loswa rose much earlier than liis 
 wont, and went out of the gilded gate of the pretty little villa 
 which he had taken for the season at St. Raphael ; a coquettish 
 place with large gardens and trellised paths overhung with 
 creepers ; and down below, a small cutter ready for use in a 
 nook of the bay where the ahies and the mimosa grew thickest. 
 It all belonged to a friend of his, who was away in distant lands 
 to escape his creditors, and by whose misfortunes Loswa had 
 profited with that easy egotism which had been so advantageous 
 to him throughout his life, and which looked so good-natured 
 that no one resented it. He descended this morning to the 
 shore by the winding cactus-lined path which led down to it, 
 and asked the sailors if they knew of an island called Bona- 
 venture. They knew nothing about it ; they, however, con- 
 sulted the admiralty maps and found it ; a tiny dot some leagues 
 to the south-westward. 
 
 A fisherman who was on the beach at the time told him 
 more. He knew the island, everybody knew it ; but nobody 
 ever was allowed to land there ; its owner was an odd man, 
 morose and suspicious ; the demoiselle was good and kind ; the 
 islet belonged to Jean Berarde, who owned every inch of it. Ho 
 would leave it to the girl of course. It was small, but of very- 
 considerable profit. Loswa listened with impatience, and told 
 his skipper to make for the isle as fast as he could. He himself 
 
 ]Q 2
 
 52 OTHMAR. 
 
 knew nothincf of the sea, and hated it ; bnt he \;^% 'p'u'i^ie au ^en. 
 Melville had almost forbidden him to go thithei', and the great 
 lady who had ridiculed him had doubted his power to paint the 
 picture of a peasant-girl. The irritation of antagonism had 
 aroused all the obstinacy and all the capricious self-will of an 
 undisciplined and vain nature. 
 
 ' To Bonaventure ! ' he said with triumph, as in the glad and 
 cloudless morning air his little vessel danced over the waves, 
 the great seagulls wheeling and screanin; in her wake. There 
 were a buoyant sea and a favouring breeze. 
 
 Loswa detested both sea and country, and was never at heart 
 content off the asphalte of the boulevards. But since it would 
 have looked veiy vulgar to spend his whole winter in Paris, he 
 selected the south coast usually for the colder months, be3ause 
 the world went with him there, because he saw so many faces 
 that were familiar, and because on this shore so thickly set with 
 chalets and villas, so artificially adorned, so trimmed, and 
 trained, and levelled, and planted by architect and landscape 
 gardener, it was possible for him to forget that he was not in 
 Paris ; the very sea itself, so blue, so tranquil, so idly basking 
 in broad light and luminous horizons, seemed like the painted 
 sea of an operetta by Lecocq. 
 
 Besides, though he had no pleasure in rural or maritime 
 things, found no joy in solitude and no consolation in nature 
 for the loss of the movement of the world, he could not have 
 been the fine colourist he was without possessing a fine sense of 
 colour, and the power to appreciate beautiful lines, and all the 
 changeful effects of light and shade. He did not see Nature as 
 Millet or Corot saw it, but as Lancret or Coypel saw it. It was 
 only a background for a nymph or a goddess to him as to them ; 
 but he was not insensible to the forms which made up that 
 background : the sunlit vapour, the blue mountain, the golden 
 woodland, or the shadowy lake. 
 
 The sea was full of life : market-boats, fishing-boats, skiffs of 
 all kinds, with striped curved lateen sails, wei-e crossing each 
 other on it. There were a few yachts, French, English, American, 
 at anchor in the bays, in waiting for the cup-races ; there were 
 some merchant ships afar off, brown-canvased brigs bearing in 
 from Genoa or Ajaccio, and the ugly black smoke of a big 
 steamer here and there defaced the marvellous blue and rose of 
 the air at the birth of day. The sea was buoyant but not rough, 
 his light cutter tlew airily as a curlew over the azure plain. 
 There were mists to the southward, lovely white mists, airy and 
 suggestive as the veil of a bride, but they floated away before 
 the sun, so rapidly as the day grew on, that the bold indented 
 lines of Corsica liecame visil)le, bathed in a rosy and golden 
 warmth. He had enough soul in liiin to feel the beauty of the 
 morning though he ha<l been playing baccarat at the club till an
 
 OTHMAR. 53 
 
 iiour or two previously ; to be conscious of the charm of this 
 full clear sunrise which bathed the world of waters in its radi- 
 ance, of the silver-shining wings of the white gulls dipping in 
 the hollov/ of the wave, of the grandeur of the land as he looked 
 back at it with its semicircles of snow-capped hills towering to 
 the skies. But he would not have cared for them had there 
 been no human interest beside them. 
 
 After sailing steadily some two hours or so they sighted, and 
 in another two hours neared, a little island which was certainly 
 the one marked on the French chart as Bonaventure, lying all 
 alone far out to the south-west. Loswa did not need the 
 positive assertion of his crew to tell him that he had arrived at 
 liis desired goal. It was small, conical-shaped, high, and steep, 
 with a broad reef of sand to the northward. It rose aloft in 
 the air, grey with olives, green with orange-trees. No habita- 
 tion was visible upon it ; but on the sand there was drawn up 
 high and dry an old boat with a sail of Venetian red stained 
 brown by wear and tear. 
 
 The island had evidently been made fruitful at the cost of 
 many centuries of labour ; the natural rock of it was terraced 
 Avith many ridges rising one above another, each j^lanted with 
 productive trees ; the soil had no doubt been carried up load by 
 load Avith infinite trouble ; but the effect of the whole was 
 luxuriant and picturesque, as the conelike mass of verdure, 
 here silver-grey and there emerald green, towered upward in 
 the thin sun-pierced vapours of the early day. 
 
 The soundings showed deep water almost up to the rock 
 itself. 
 
 ' I am going to sketch,' said Loswa to his skipper as he 
 pointed to the level strip of sand. ' Let me land there.' 
 
 Their assertions that no one ever did land there he dis- 
 regarded. A small boat was rowed up to the stri]) of beach, and 
 he got out, bidding his sailors wait round the edge of a jutting 
 rock, which would give them shade as the day should advance. 
 
 He glanced at the old red coble drawn up on the shore. It 
 was the same he had seen three days before ; he felt sure of it 
 by its colour and its build. 
 
 He looked about him and around him for a means of ascent, 
 and saw a zigzag path that Avound up through the hanging 
 orchards of olive, of lemon, and of orange, and higher still the 
 rope-ladder called passerelle, so often used in the Riviera to 
 climb steep rocks. The air Avas full of the intense perfume of 
 the trees, Avhich were starred all over Avith their white blossoms. 
 He thought of Sicily, Avhere you have to shut your door against 
 the fragrance of the fields in spring, lest you shculd faint and 
 Bleep for ever from their fragrance. 
 
 The path and the passcrelle Avould certainly, he reasoned, lead 
 up to any house there might be at the summit. He slung his
 
 54 OTHMAR. 
 
 sketching things over his shoulder and began to mount the 
 crooked rocky road of moss-grown stone with cyclamen growing 
 in its crevices, and the rose-hued flowers of the leafless cereua 
 springing up here and there. 
 
 But he was not allowed to ascend unchallenged ; high above 
 him there was a rustling sound, then a deep angry growl, and 
 in a moment or two a great white Pyrenean dog showed himself, 
 stared down at him with frank hostility, and bounded headlong 
 from ridge to ridge underneatli the boughs, wdth full intent to 
 reach him and devour liim. But a voice called aloud : ' To, to, 
 Clovis ! ' and Loswa smiled. He knew he had succeeded. 
 
 Through the labyrinth of branches, springing after the dog, 
 came the girl who had thrown back the gold bracelet to the lady 
 of St. Pharamond. 
 
 ' The dog will not hurt you whilst I am here,' she called out 
 to him. ' But he might kill you if I were not. Do you want 
 my grandfather ? Why have you landed here % It is private 
 ground. He has gone to Grasse for two days to see an oil mer- 
 chant.' 
 
 Loswa felt that he could not have timed his visit more 
 felicitously. 
 
 'Good heavens ! what a handsome child,' he thought, as he 
 bowed to her with his easy grace and that eloquent glance 
 which had power to stir the most languid pulses of his patrician 
 sitters. 
 
 ' I landed in hopes that I might be allowed to paint the 
 view from this exquisite little spot,' he said with well-acted 
 hesitation in his manner, ' A friend of mine, who is, I think, 
 a friend of yours too, a priest of the name of Melville, has 
 spoken to me so often of the beauty of your island.' 
 
 Standing above him, holding the big dog by the collar, she 
 smiled at the name of Melville, and came a few steps nearer 
 with more confidence. She never for a moment doubted the 
 entire truth of what he said. 
 
 Her bluc-and-brown-stripcd linen gown was but a wisp ; it 
 had Ijcen drenched througli in its time with sea-water, and had 
 the stains of grasses, and dews, and sands, and fruits upon it ; 
 it was bound round her waist by a leathern belt, and its short 
 sleeves Avere pulled up to the shoulder, as they had been the day 
 before. But no artist Mould have wished for a better dress, and 
 even a sculptor would not have desired to remove it from the 
 limbs that it clung to so closely that it hid nothing of their 
 perfect shape and the curves of the tliroat and breast that had 
 the indecision and softness of childliood witli tlie fulness of 
 feminine growth. Her hair was tucked away under a red fisher 
 cap, a veritable bonnet rouge ; and her hirge brilliant eyes, of an 
 indescribal)lc colour, Avcre shining, as if the sun was imprisoned 
 in tliem, under level, dark delicate eyebrows. Her skin was
 
 OTHMAR. 55 
 
 fair, her hair auburn. He thought he had seen nothing so 
 i:)erfectly lovely in all his life : it was a living Titian, a virgin 
 Giorgione. 
 
 ' Anyone "who knows Monsignor Melville is welcome to 
 Bonaventure,' she said frankly. ' It is a pity my grandfather is 
 away. He does not like strangers, but a friend of Monsignor's 
 would not seem so to him. No one has ever been here to 
 jiaint anything before. What is it you want to paint — the 
 house ? ' 
 
 Loswa knew that he had done a dishonourable thing, and a 
 mean one, in using Melville's name as a passport to a place 
 where IMelville would never have allowed him to go had he 
 known it ; but, like everyone else, having begun on a wrong- 
 course he -went on in it. He had succeeded so well at the com- 
 mencement that he would not listen to that delicacy of good 
 breeding which represented conscience to him. 
 
 ' Do not be afraid of Clovis. He will not hurt you now he 
 sees that I speak to you ; he is so sensible. Will you come now 
 or another day ] ' she asked him with the frankness of aboy. 
 
 'We have a Latin poet wlio tells us that to-day alone is our 
 own,' said Loswa with a smile. ' I will come now at once, and 
 most gladly, Clovis is a grand dog and a good guard for his 
 young mistress,' he added ; thinking to himself, ' how lovely she 
 is, and she knows it no more than if she were a sea anemone on 
 the shore ; and she looks at me and speaks to me witli no more, 
 embarrassment than if I were but the wooden figure of a 
 ship ! ' 
 
 'I will come up most gladly,' he said again, with more 
 ardour than he showed in a duchess's drawing-rooms. ' It is so 
 very kind of you. I am sure the view from the summit must 
 be magnificent. I fear though,' he added, with hypocritical 
 modesty, ' that it will be beyond my powers.' 
 
 ' I liope not. I shall like to see anyone paint,' she said with 
 cordiality ; and added, a little ashamed, 'I have never seen 
 anyone paint ; I have heard of such a thing of course, and there 
 are the pictures in the churches and chapels which one knows 
 were painted by men ; but I have no idea of liow it is done.' 
 
 ' You should have been shown by Raphael himself,' said 
 Loswa. 
 
 ' Raphael ? ' she echoed. ' Oh no, he is our fruit-packer ; 
 he would not know how to do it any better than I do,' she said 
 as she turned and began to ascend to show him the way. 
 
 ' Can you climb % ' she added, looking at him doubtfully. ' I 
 mean climb where it is like a stone wall \ ' 
 
 She had taken him under her protection and into her favour, 
 but he felt that he would have preferred to this frank innocent 
 friendliness a certain hesitatioii and embarrassment such as 
 would have indicated a different kind of s-utiment as possibly.
 
 56 OTHMAR. 
 
 She was as kind to him, as simple and frank and candid with 
 him, as if he were any old fisherman that she had known from 
 her birth. It was not what he desired, yet it had a certain 
 charm ; it was so childlike, so honest, so free from all affecta- 
 tion or self-consciousness, or lurking suspicion or intention ot 
 any sort. 
 
 ' Clovis is so good,' she pursued, all unconscious of his re- 
 flections. ' His wife (she is called Brunebildt) had four puppies 
 yesterday. Two were drowned ; it was such a pity ! I am 
 going to give one of the two left to Monsignor ; he is always 
 fond of dogs. Take care how you come up, it is very steep ; 
 for me I am used to it. I run up and down a dozen times a 
 day ; but a person not used to it may slip.' 
 
 It was, indeed, steep, and often there w^ere ledges of rock 
 in tlie way which had to be jumped over or scrambled over in 
 anj' handiest fashion, whilst on others the perpendicular face of 
 the cliff could only be ascended by the rope-ladder so often in 
 use in the Riviera ; but Loswa, in an indolent way, was athletic ; 
 he had in his youth been skilled in gymnastic exercises, and 
 though now enervated by his life in cities, he kept apace with 
 her, and soon had gained the level summit of the island, a broad 
 green tableland planted with olives and oranges, with here and 
 there a great stone pine, relic of the wild pine woods which, 
 before \hQ 'pei'xte cifiiitrchad stepped thither with axe and spade, 
 liad clothed doubtless the whole of Bonaventure down to the 
 water's edge. 
 
 There was some ground planted with cabbages and arti- 
 chokes, some place where maize would be planted later in the 
 season, but the chief of the land was orchard ; and in the midst 
 of it stood a long, low whitewashed house, with pink shutters 
 and a tiled roof. 
 
 ' Now look ! ' she said, with a little pride in her voice as she 
 stretched her hand out to the northward view. 
 
 EveryAvhcrc far below them, stretching out to infinite in- 
 definite horizons, was the blue sea studded with various sails ; 
 and the beautiful coast stretched likewise away into endless 
 realms of sparkling light; the range of the mountains rose blue 
 and snow-crowned behind that fairy shore ; and this enchanted 
 paradise was always there to cull men's thoiiglits to nature, and 
 they in it only though tof the hell of the punters, the caress of 
 the v.oroHo^ the shining gold rolling in under the croupier's rake ! 
 
 Familiar as he was witli tlii.s sea and land, he could not re- 
 strain an exclamation of wondering admiration. 
 
 ' No wonder you have liecome the beautiful thing you are, 
 looking on all that beauty from your birth ! ' he said in an im- 
 ])id-;e of frank admiration, mingled with his habitual language 
 of flatteiy.
 
 OTHMAR. 57 
 
 The girl laughed. 
 
 ' Do you think I am beautiful ? Everybody always says 
 that. But grandfather grumbles ; he says it is the devil's gift. 
 Myself, I do not know ; the flowers are beautiful, but I do not 
 think that human beings are so.' 
 
 ' And you have grown up like a floAver ' 
 
 ' How did you know about me 1 ' she interrupted him. ' Did 
 Monsignor Melville speak so much of me ? He was with my 
 uncle in his last illness, you know, and whenever he is on this 
 coast he comes to us. You like the view \ ' she continued with 
 satisfaction and a sense of possession of it. ' Yes ; it is good 
 to see, is it not ? But I am happier when I am down on the 
 shore.' 
 
 ' Indeed ! Why ? ' 
 
 ' Because there one only wants to swim, and here one wants 
 to fly. Now, one does swim ; one cannot fly.' 
 
 ' To covet the impossible is the only divine thing in man,' 
 said he with a smile. ' It is just because we have that longing 
 to fly that we may hope we are made to do something more than 
 walk.' 
 
 ' Do you mean that discontent is good ? ' she said with 
 surprise. 
 
 ' In a certain measure, perhaps. ' 
 
 'Content is better,' she said sturdily. 
 
 * I hope you will always be blessed with it. It is like a 
 swallow, it brings peace where it rests,' said her guest with a 
 little sigh ; and he thought : ' My lady j'onder is never content ; 
 it is the penalty of culture. Will this child be so always in her 
 ignorance ? Will she marry the skipper of a merchant-ship or 
 the owner of an olive-yard, and live hajipily ever afterwards, 
 with a tribe of little brown-eyed children that will run out into 
 the road with flowers for the carriages ? I suppose so ; why 
 not ? Melville said in her little way she was an heiress. Of 
 course, all the louts that own a fishing-coble or an acre of 
 orange-trees will be eager to annex her and her island.' 
 
 She was walking by his side under the gnarled olives which 
 had been stripped a month before of tlieir black berries. She 
 was looking at him frankly, curiously, with doubtful glances. 
 
 'I am afraid you are of the noblesse,' she said, abruptly 
 stopping short within a yard of the house. 
 
 'What makes you think that?' he said, aware that he re- 
 ceived the prettiest of indirect compliments which a much 
 flattered life had ever given him. 
 
 ' You look like it,' she answered. ' You have an air about 
 you, and your linen is so fine, and your voice is soft and slow. 
 It is only the noble people who have that kind of music in 
 *heir voices,'
 
 58 OTHMAR. 
 
 * I wis]\ I were a peasant if it would please you better,' he 
 said gallantly. 
 
 She answered very literally : 
 
 ' That is nonsense. You cannot wish such a thing ; no one 
 ever wishes to go dow^n. And, for myself, I do not mind ; it is 
 my grandfather who hates the aristocrats.' 
 
 'So I have heard,' said Loswa. 'But he is out to-day, you 
 say. Will you not let me sketch this superb view / ' 
 
 ' Yes, if you like. I never saw anyone paint, as I told you ; 
 I shall be glad to see it. But will you not come in and eat and 
 drink something first? 1 have heard that the nobles, when 
 tliey are not dressing and dancing, are always eating and 
 drinking.' 
 
 ' Nothing more cruel was ever said of them by all their 
 satirists,' answered Loswa. 'It will be very kind indeed if 
 you will give me a glass of Avater ; I need nothing else.' 
 
 ' You shall have some of Catlaerine's cakes,' said the girl, 
 ' and some coffee and a fresh egg. Catherine— she is our ser- 
 vant—makes beautiful cakes when she is not cross. Why are 
 people Avho are old so often cross ] Is it the trouble of living so 
 long that makes them so ? If it be that, I would rather die 
 young. I think one ought tc be like the olive-trees ; the older 
 they are the better fruit they boar.' 
 
 Then she called aloud, ' Catherine ! Catherine ! here is a 
 stranger Avho wants some breakfast,' and ran across the bit of 
 rough grass before the house, where cocks and hens, pigeons 
 and rabbits, a tethered ass and a pet kid, were enjoying the 
 line moniing together in harmony. 
 
 An old woman in a white cap showed herself for a moment 
 in the doorway, grumbled inarticulately, and disappeared. 
 
 ' She is gone to get it,' said Damaris. ' She is very cross, as 
 I tell you, but she is veiy good for all that. I have known her 
 all my life. Her honey is the best in the country. She always 
 prays for the bees. My grandfather does not know it, but 
 when it is swarming time she says a i)aternoster over each hive, 
 and the honey comes so yellow, so smooth, so fine ; its taste is 
 like the smell of thyme. Come through the house to my ter- 
 race ; you shall have your breakfast there.' 
 
 He followed her tlnough the house, an ugly whitewashed 
 place, with nothing of grace or colour about it, though cleaner 
 tlian most such dwellings are upon the mainland ; it smelt 
 sweetly, too, from the Hood of fragrant, orungescented air 
 which poured through past its open doors, and the odour from 
 the bales of packed oranges whicli were stored in its passages and 
 lumber-rooms, awaiting transport to the beach below. In the 
 gue-st-chamber there w;is some old ojikcn furniture of which lie 
 recognised tlie age and value, ami some chairs of rrponsse 
 leather, which would have fetched a high price ; but it was all
 
 OTHMAR. 59 
 
 dreary, dull, stiff, and the figure of tlie girl, with her brilliant, 
 luminous beauty, and her vividly-coloured clothes, looked like 
 a pomegranate flaming in a dusky cellar. 
 
 ' Come out here,' she said to him, and led him out on to a 
 little terrace. 
 
 It was Avhitewashed, like all the stone of the house, but it 
 was gay and bright. Its gallery was covered with a Canadian 
 vine still red ; it seemed to hang above the sea, so steeply did 
 that side of the island slope downward beneath it ; it had some 
 cane chairs in it and a little marble table, a red-striped awning 
 was stretclied above it. 
 
 'This is all mine,' she said, with pride. 'You shall eat here. 
 Take that long chair : it came off one of the great ships tliat go 
 the voyages to India ; the mate of the ship gave it me. I 
 made that awning myself out of a sail. I bring my books here 
 and read. Sometimes 1 sit here half the night instead of going 
 to bed — that is, wlien the nightingales are singing in the orange- 
 trees. My grandfather will always have the house-door shut 
 and bolted by eight o'clock, even in summer. So 1 come here ; 
 it seems such folly to go to bed in the sliort nights, they are as 
 bright as day. The time to sleep then is noon. You rest, and 
 I will go and bring Catherine, and your breakfast.' 
 
 He caught her hand as she was about to go away. 
 
 'Pray, stay,' he murmured. 'It is to hear you talk that I 
 care ; I want nothing else, not even that glass of water ; I only 
 made it an excuse to come into your house.' 
 
 She drew her hand from him and frowned a little. 
 
 ' Why should you make an excuse \ If you had said you 
 wished to come I Avould have let you ; if you do not want to 
 eat there is nothing to come for ; I am never indoors excejit to 
 eat, or if it rain very heavily.' 
 
 Then she went, and he dared not detain her lest he should 
 alarm her. She seemed to him like a bird which alights near a 
 stranger so long as there is no movement, but at a single sound 
 takes flight. Left alone he sat still in the chair she had assigned 
 to him, and gazed over the sea ; there was nothing except sea 
 visible from this little terrace. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 In a little while she returned, bearing in her strong grasp an 
 old silver tray, with coflee, ci'eam, and sugar in old silver pots. 
 
 The servant followed her, cross, wrinkled and suspicious, 
 carrying bread and honey and oranges, and a pile of sweet flat 
 cakes. Damaris set down her tray on the marble table. 
 
 ' We have a few things like this,' she said, touching the old 
 silver. 'We were noble, too, once, very, very long ago, they
 
 6o OTHMAR. 
 
 say ; but my grandfather does not believe it. I like to believe 
 it. It may be nonsense, bat one likes to fancy that ever, ever 
 so long ago one's forefathers Avere fighting men, net labourers ; 
 it seems to make one ready t j fight too. It must make a dif- 
 ference, I think, in oneself whether they were soldiers or slaves. 
 Not, you know,' she added, after a moment's pause, ' that I do 
 not think la feiitc culture the Inppiest life in the world ; but the 
 labourer is narrow, mean, horribly fond of money, and very 
 rougli to his women, and I suppose the poor Avere still worse in 
 that distant time.' 
 
 She poured him out his coU'ec as she spoke, and filled up the 
 cup with foaming milk, and pressed on him the rolls, the cakes, 
 tlie honey. The china was the lieavy earthenware which rustic 
 people use, and did not suit the old silver of the tray and of the 
 vessels ; but Loswa, for once, was not critical ; he thought he 
 had never tasted anything more delicious than was this island 
 fare. 
 
 Damaris, having served him, ate and drank herself, sitting 
 on a wooden stool beside the balustrade covered with the red- 
 dened creeper. She did not want anything, but not to break 
 bread Avith a guest seemed to her bad manners. She had pulled 
 her sleeves down and put (ni shoes and stockings. She had 
 thrown aside her woollen cap ; her silky, golden curls shone in 
 the sun ; her eyes looked at liim with honest inquisitiveness 
 and astonishment. Suddenly she said aloud : 
 
 ' Ah ! I remember now ! It was you who were with that 
 lady yesterday when she threw me the gold bracelet over the 
 wall.' 
 
 Loswa assented, but he would have preferred to forget hia 
 friend at that moment, being uneasily conscious of the contempt 
 with which his present position on this terrace would be re- 
 garded by her did she ever know of it. 
 
 ' Did she take me for a beggar ? ' said Damaris, with anger 
 glistening under her long lashes. 
 
 ' Oh no, she only wisheil to jilease you — to surprise you. 
 You see, she could not tell who you were.' 
 
 The girl's cheeks grew a deeper rose. 
 
 'That is true,' she said, with her first touch of embarrass- 
 ment ; 'I w^as rowing, and one cannot row in fine clothes. 
 Perhaps, if she saw me at Mass ' 
 
 'If she saw you now ! ' said he, with a glance of meaning 
 thrown away upon her. ' Remember, she hardly saw you at 
 all ; only an old boat, a ]iile of orau'^'C!, a ragged sail ' 
 
 'My sail is very shabby,' said Damaris with shame. 'I 
 took the new one to make this awning, and my grandfather was 
 angry and would not let me liave another. Who is that lady ? 
 She looked vtTy pretty. Is slie your wife i ' 
 
 ' She ii the Countess Oihmar.
 
 OTHMAR. 6i 
 
 * The Countess Othmar ! ' she repeated in a little awe. 
 Even she in her soUtude had heard that name of power. The 
 narrative was very vague to her ; she had never known more 
 than the hare outline of it, but she remembered, when she was 
 a child sitting amongst the dafludils and plucking them on the 
 grass before the house on Bonaventure one evening in the 
 springtime, hearing Catherine, who had been with a load of 
 fruit to the mainland, cry aloud to Raphael : 
 
 ' Holy Virgin, what think you ? The fttioie of Nicole, the 
 wife of Othmar, is dead ! ' 
 
 And the child, pausing with the daifodils lying in tumbled 
 gold upon her lap, had listened and heard all that was known 
 of that early death, which only the swallows had witnessed and 
 the blind house-dog had mourned. She had always remembered 
 it, and often, when she had seen the dafibdils yellow in the 
 grass of March, had thought of it again, and her imagination 
 had been busy with it, creating bodily forms for the people of 
 whom she knew naught but the names. Therefore, when the 
 word ' Othmar ' fell now upon her ear, it moved her with a 
 certain thrill, almost as of personal pain. 
 
 ' You have heard of her ? ' said Loswa. 
 
 ' Not of her,' said Damaris gravely ; ' of the one who died — 
 who killed herself, they say, because he loved another woman.' 
 
 ' Bah ! ' said Loswa, with the light contempt for all such 
 tragic follies which the boulevardier always aliects, even when 
 he does not feel it. 
 
 ' They said so,' repeated Damaris, Avith her eyes very large 
 and sei'ious. 
 
 ' Do you like this lady very much 1 ' she asked, after a 
 pause. 
 
 ' She is a charming person ; yes.' 
 
 * Is she a very great lady '\ Does she reign over anything ? ' 
 
 ' Over everyone she approaches, if she can,' said he with some 
 impatience ; ' and nearly always she can, for she is a person of 
 very strong will, and intiuences others more than she knows or 
 they know,' 
 
 'And what does she do when she has influenced them? 
 Monsignor says that to possess influence is to have tlie ten 
 talents, and that we shall have to account for the use of every 
 one of them.' 
 
 ' That is just the chief mischief,' said Loswa, gloomily think- 
 ing of himself, not of his auditor. ' It is the getting the in- 
 fluence that amuses her ; that she cares about. When once 
 she has got it you are nothing at all to her ; no more than a 
 glove she has worn.' 
 
 ' She must be a very cruel woman,' said Damaris. 
 
 ' Oh no,' he protested, with a sudden sense of his disloyalty, 
 ♦ she is not cruel at all, she is only indiff'erent.'
 
 62 OTHAfAR. 
 
 'Iiiclifferont ? That is ty neither like nor dislike? I cto 
 not understand how one can bo like that. One must either 
 have good weather or bad ; one must eitlier love or hate.' 
 
 ' She does neither,' said he Avith a sigh ; then, with a sense 
 that it was altogether wrong to blame a great lady and a 
 countrywoman of his own to a little coinitry girl whom he had 
 never seen before, he changed the subject abruptly. 
 
 'Are you not very dull on your island 1 It is a long Avay tlT 
 the mainland.' 
 
 ' Dull ? Oh, people must be very stupid Avho are ever dull. 
 There is always so much to do out among the fruit-trees or 
 down by the beach. The days are always too short for me.' 
 
 ' That is the charm of being fifteen. Are you always on this 
 island ? Do you never go to Nice ? ' 
 
 ' I have never seen Nice. I did want to see the Carnival 
 last year, but my grandfather would not hear of it. It Avas 
 Raphael told me about it. It must have been very fine ; but, 
 of course, Ave have nothing to do Avith the mainland, that is 
 only for tlie rich idle people. I hear they sleej:) all the day and 
 buzz about all the night, like motlis or like bats. What a 
 strange life it must be ! ' 
 
 LosAva thought of the great gaslit glittering Salle des Jeux 
 ^A'hich Avas not more than a dozen leagues oti' this primitive 
 orange-island. 
 
 ' You are happier here, in the middle of your blue water, 
 putting out your oil lainjis as the moon rises,' he replied. 
 * Chateaubriand might have lived on Bonavcnture. Who Avould 
 have believed there A\'ns anj'thing so solitary and so innocent as 
 this Avithin a few hours' sail of the Blanc ]iaradise ? ' 
 
 ' What is that ? ' said Damaris, aa-Iio, although she could see 
 afar off the palms and domes of Monte Carlo gleaming in the 
 sun on the nortliAvard horizon every time she sailed that Avaj'', 
 ■was as profoundly ignorant of the tri^oot and its Avorks as if 
 Boiiaventure had been in the Pacific. 
 
 'I have heard,' she continued, ' that there are very strange 
 things and people over there, tliat it is a feast-day every day 
 with them, and all their life like a fair. My grandfather 
 ahvays says he Avould shoot them all down as they shot the 
 hostages in the Commune, but I do not think that Avould be 
 right. If they are silly, one sh')ukl pity them.' 
 
 ' Thoy are silly indeed, and I fear your sweet pity Avould 
 not avail to save them. The feast-day is a sorry affair at its 
 close.' 
 
 ' Oh, I knoAV. I have seen Ivaphael cume home drunk and 
 beat Jacqueline (that is his Avife) because she cried ; and he is 
 as good as gold Avhen he is sober, and as gentle as a sheep Avhen 
 there is no drink.' 
 
 'In some Avay Ave all drink, avc unfortunates,' said LosAva;
 
 OTHMAR. 63 
 
 llien, seeing her look of surprise, he added, ' I did not speak 
 literally, my dear ; your liaphaeFs drink is a •petit tin hleu, and 
 ours is a costly thing we call Pleasure, but it comes to the same 
 result ; only, I suppose, Rapliael has some five or six days in 
 the week that he is good for work, and we cannot say as much 
 as that. We are all the week round at the fair.' 
 
 She ruffled her pretty loose short locks that hung over her 
 forehead, and her brilliant eyes looked at him peri)lexedly. 
 
 ' I am glad I live on the island,' she said as the issue of her 
 perplexity. 
 
 'And I too am glad you do,' said he, Avith more sincerity 
 than he usually put into his pretty speeches. 
 
 He felt that before he approadied the great object of his 
 voyage lie must justify his pretences and win her confidence by 
 painting something which would please her fancy. To his 
 facility of touch it was easy and rapid work to sketch on his 
 block of paper the sen view, tlie terrace wall, the interior of the 
 sitting-room, the old chairs, and the silver tankards. Sheet 
 after sheet was filled and cut oft' and sent fluttering into her 
 eager hands. To her it seemed the work of magic. Just a 
 little water and a few pans of colour could make all the sea and 
 sky, all the plants and stones, all the pots and pans and house- 
 hold things, seem real again on fragments of paper ! She did 
 not heed or even know that he was a man, young and handsome, 
 wliose eyes spoke a bold and amorous language ; she was ab- 
 sorbed in his creations ; lie seemed to her the most marvellous 
 of sorcerers. With delighted cries of recognition she welcomed 
 the likeness of all the places and the objects so familiar to her ; 
 she was filled witli a rapture of childish ecstasy. She hung 
 over his work and watched him with a wonder which was only 
 not awe, because it was such frank and childish delight. 
 
 Whilst he sketched, he let her talk at her will, in her own 
 fashion, putting a few careless questions now and then. She 
 was by nature gay and communicative ; the seclusion and 
 severity of her rearing had not extinguished the natural buoy- 
 ancy and originality of her temper, and it was a pleasure to her 
 to have anyone to speak to of other things than the land labours 
 and the household work. 
 
 In a few brief pjhrases she had described to him all her short 
 simple life ; how her mother had died at her birth, they said, 
 and her fatlier when she had been eight years old ; how she had 
 never been baptised 'or anything,' until, to please Melville, 
 her grandsire had allowed her to enter the Church's fold like a 
 little stray sheep ; how she had been brought up by old Cathe- 
 rine, and taught to read by her, and how she had managed to 
 read all the books her mother had left : Corneille, Racine, 
 Lamartine, Lamotte, Fouquet, La Fontaine, and knew thera 
 almost all by heart, for she had no new ones ; she told him all
 
 64 OTHMAR. 
 
 about the culture of the olive and the various kinds of orangea, 
 and all the different methods of pruning, tending, packing them ; 
 the big fi-agrant golden balls were much nearer to her heart 
 than the lilack oily olives, but she was learned about both ; she 
 told him also all about the poor people she knew on the coast, 
 of the young men whom the conscription had taken just as they 
 were of use to their people, of the old women who took the 
 flowers into the towns, of the children who could swim and dive 
 like little fish, and were her playmates when she had time to 
 play ; the boat-builders, the fisherfolk, the flower-sellers, the 
 toilers of the working world of whom all the fashionable world 
 that flocks to the Riviera knows nothing, unless it throws them 
 a few pence in the dust of the road, or thinks tliey form a pretty 
 point of colour against the white walls and the flower-filled grass, 
 or bids them make a bouillahaisse for a picnic in some little 
 wooden cabin high up upon the red rocks, amongst the cactus 
 spikes and the sea-pinks. 
 
 All this simple talk interested Loswa as it would never have 
 done had not the mouth which uttered it been as lovely to look 
 at as a half-opened damask rose. 
 
 ' How came Monsignor Melville to speak of me to you ? ' 
 she asked once with a persistency which was a strong trait of 
 her character. 
 
 ' He recognised you,' he answered her. ' He told us that 
 you were prouder than any princess of them all, and that where 
 we had meant but a joke you had, very naturally, seen an affront. 
 He is much attached to you, I am sure, and felt quite as angry 
 as you were. 
 
 ' I was veiy angry,' she said passionately, with the colour 
 hot in her cheeks. ' I thought the lady took me for a beggar. 
 When one goes in a boat one cannot be endimanchee. I was 
 taking the oranges to the Petite Afrique ; there is a little old 
 woman who keeps a little old shop there, and has nothing but 
 what she makes by the sale of the fruit people give her. There 
 are three trees here that are my own ; my fatlier planted tliem 
 when he was liome from a voyage, and to all tlieir fruit I have a 
 right. Grandfather lets me sell it or give it away.' 
 
 ' And I am sure you do always the latter ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, not quite always. Sometimes I want money for some- 
 thing, and tlien I sell the oranges ; but it is only if there be a 
 wreck, or a boat lost at sea, or a death or a birth. Of course I 
 want nothing for myself ; grandfatlier docs not let me want, but 
 he is not fond of giving to others, he likes to keep money locked 
 up, and see it grow slowly liit upon bit like the coral. Do you 
 like that ? Myself, I think there is no pleasure at all in money 
 except to give it away. ' 
 
 ' But whom do you give it to ? You are all alone on your 
 island,'
 
 OTHMAR. 65 
 
 ' There are the people who work for us ; and then I icuow so 
 many on the coast. I have come and gone between this and 
 the mainland so many many times, ever since I was a baby. It 
 is such a good life being on the sea ; so long as I have the 
 water I never want anything else. Some of them call me la, 
 mouette.'' 
 
 ' It is the best of all lives. I am much on the sea myself,' 
 said her companion, who hated the sea. 
 
 ' You have a boat then l ' 
 
 'I have a yacht ; yes.' 
 
 ' All to yourself ? ' 
 
 ' Yes ; to go about in as I fancy. I shall be delighted if you 
 will sail in it some day.' 
 
 ' Ah ! it is a pleasure-ship then ? I see those little ships 
 racing often ; they are beautiful. You must be very rich to 
 have one all to yourself, not trading anywhere, or even dredg- 
 ing. How much money have you i And how do you keep it ? 
 In boxes, in cofiers ? Some of my grandfather's is down the 
 well ; he took bricks out of the side of the well, put the money 
 in the hole, and then put back the bricks again. He did it at 
 night ; no one knows it but me. Do you keep your money like 
 that ? ' 
 
 ' No ; in our woi'ld we give it to other men to take care of 
 for us.' 
 
 ' That seems very stupid. Why not take care of your own 1 ' 
 
 She was sitting on the parapet of the terrace, her feet hung 
 clown ; she leaned one hand on the stone she sat on ; behind 
 her was the broad blue of the sky, and about her all the shining 
 of the effulgent light. She looked like a rhododendron flower 
 growing up into the sunshine out of a corner of a dusky old 
 garden. 
 
 ' You have not told me how much money you have,' she 
 pursued. ' If you let other folks take care of it for you, it is no 
 wonder that you gentle people come to poverty so often.' 
 
 ' We have too many caretakers, no doubt,' said Loswa, ' and 
 they feather their own nests. But I am not a very rich man ; 
 pray do not think I am. I am only an artist. Nobody is rich 
 now except the Jews here, and the rogues across the Atlantic. 
 Would you let me make a sketch of yourself just as you sit 
 now? It would be charming.' 
 
 ' Will you give it to that lady ? ' 
 
 ' No, on my honour. I will give it to you, and make a copy 
 for myself.' 
 
 ' Well, if you like ; but would it not be better if I put ou 
 my Sunday frock 1 ' 
 
 ' Not for worlds. Sunday frocks have no affinity with art, 
 my dear ; yours is, no doubt, a very pretty one, but I should 
 prefer to make your portrait as I have seen you first.'
 
 66 OTHMAR 
 
 * Oh, I el* not mind ; only this gown is very shabby and aid. 
 I am grown too big for it. I am always growing. Ivlonsignor 
 says that if I grew in grace as I do in centimetres I should soon 
 be a saint like our St. Veronica.' 
 
 ' It is not for me to disparage the saints,' said Loswa, ' but I 
 think you will have another mission in this life than to be of 
 their community. Keep still a little while ; I will not detain 
 you long. So ! — that is just right. I wish I were Raflaelleand 
 Leonardo in one, to be worthier of the occasion.' 
 
 ' Wlio are they 1 ' said Damaris, as he set his folding easel 
 straight before him and began to sketch in the flowcrlike figure 
 on the wall, fresh and wholesome as the sea-lavender that grew 
 in the sand below. He who was all his life in a hothouse recog- 
 nised the value and fragrance of that sea-born pjlant, though it 
 was too homely and simple for him ; recognised it with his mind, 
 though not with his soul. 
 
 The girl knew notliing of all that made up the world to him ; 
 the names most common to him in modern literature and art 
 were to her dead letters that said nothing ; the allusions familiar 
 to him would have been to her phrases without meaning ; all 
 that constitutes modern culture was to her as an unknown 
 country, and the only wliisper she had ever heard of all that 
 poets and artists tell the world was what she had felt rather 
 than understood of the read and re-read pages of ' Athalic,' and 
 of ' Attila,' of ' Cinna,' and of 'Sintram.' Yet there was a 
 certain richness, as of virgin soil, in that absolute freedom from 
 conventional education, and from received ideas ; she expressed 
 herself with simplicity and vigour, and this iniworn, untrained 
 mind, only nurtured on the high thoughts of great poets, had 
 escap)ed all the bondage of tradition and of secondhand know- 
 ledge, and remained what it had been made by nature. 
 
 It required a higher intelligence than Loswa's was wholly to 
 appreciate this charm ; he was too conventional to be greatly 
 attracted by unconventional things ; he Avas too used to all tlie 
 artificial attractions of artilicial women, and too artificial himself 
 to enjoy and admire all this freshness of fancy. It would have 
 needed a poet to have done so, and he had nothing of the poet 
 in him. 33ut he was enough of a student of human nature to 
 understand that witli which he scarcely sympathised, and she 
 was so handsome that her physical beauty created in him a 
 compassion for the solitude in which it dwelt, such compassion 
 as her intellectual solitude, and her half -unconscious longing for 
 wider worlds tlian lier own, would have failed to awaken. 
 
 ' Is it possible that all that is to go to a gros bourfieois wlio 
 builds boats ? ' he thought, as he looked at the beautiful lines of 
 lier features and her form, and that fairness of her skin just 
 warmed by sun and air into the bloom as of a peach, whicli he 
 strove in vain to reproduce to his own satisfaction in his drawing.
 
 OTHMAR. 67 
 
 A face that would turn all Paris after it like sunflowers after the 
 sun, to be left to pass from the glow of youth to the greyness of 
 age on a little island in mid-sea ! It seemed impossible — it 
 would become impossible if she once learned her own charms. 
 
 ' Your isle is worthy of Paul and Virginia,' he said to her, 
 speaking to her in the plu-ase that she could understand, for she 
 knew every line of Bernardin de St. Pierre. ' But where is 
 Paul ? Is there no Paul ? ' 
 
 ' No, there is nobody at all like Paul,' she answered, with a 
 little laugh at the idea. ' The youngest man is Raphael, and he 
 has a fat wife and five children. They live down on the other 
 side of the cliffs.' 
 
 ' But Paul will come,' said Loswa. ' He always comes. 
 Would you let me substitute myself for him I ' he added with 
 that somewhat impertinent audacity which had made his success 
 so great amongst women of the world. 
 
 It did not please Damaris. Her brows drew together in that 
 instantaneous and tempestuous anger which her face had ex- 
 pressed as the bracelet had fallen on her lap. 
 
 'You are not at all like Paul,' she said a little contemi^tu- 
 ously. ' You are not young enough, and you have wrinkles 
 about your eyes.' 
 
 Loswa reddened with irritation. He was still young, but 
 life in the world ages fast, and he was conscious that to this 
 child, in the first flush and sunrise of her earliest girlhood, he 
 might well seem old. 
 
 'You are cruel,' he said humbly, 'and I am unhappy ; lean 
 only envy the Paul of the future.' 
 
 'Oh,' said Damaris very tranquillj^ 'I know all about my 
 future. I am to marry my cousin, Louis Roze ; he has a cliantier 
 at St. Tropez ; he is quite rich ; he is very ugly and stout ; 
 he builds boats and barques ; myself, I would sooner sail in 
 them.' 
 
 She said all the sentences in the same even voice 
 seemed to her to be hardly of as much interest as the boats. 
 
 ' Good heavens ! ' said Loswa involuntarily. ' Athene to a 
 Satyr ! ' 
 
 He could imagine the shipwright of St. Tropez without much 
 effort of imagination; a black-browed son of the soil, smoking a 
 short pipe, supping up prawn-soup noisily on feast days ; a 
 Socialist, no doubt, and an argumentative politician when he 
 had drunk his glass of brandy, or he would not be to the taste 
 of the Sieur Berarde, her grandfather. This her future ! As 
 well might a young nightingale, singing under acacia flowers in 
 spring, talk of its future when it should be roasting on the spit 
 to give a mouthful to a boor ! 
 
 ' Do you not intend to refuse 1 ' he said abruptly, without 
 thinking whither such suggestion might lead her. 
 
 ^2
 
 68 OTHMAR. 
 
 She turned quickly and looked at him with astonished eyes ; 
 her breath came and went more quickly. 
 
 ' Refuse ! ' she repeated. ' Refuse ! oh no ; what would be 
 the use ? No one refuses to do what my grandfather has decided 
 for them.' 
 
 ' But you cannot be willing to make such a marriage ? ' 
 
 She was astonished and troubled by the rebellious sugges- 
 tion, 
 
 ' I do not think about it,' she replied at last, shaking the 
 hair out of her eyes. ' It is % thing which is to be, you know. 
 What is the use of thinking \ I am not to leave Bonaventure. 
 I should not like to marry an j^ one who would not live on Bona- 
 venture ; but if I stay here and live as I always have done, it 
 will not make any difference at all.' 
 
 He was silent. This absolute ignorance of what she talked 
 about seemed to him pathetic and sacred. He did not wish to 
 be the one to break away the wall which stood between her and 
 the realities of life. 
 
 'He thinks of making a cltantier here,' she explained ; 'the 
 only doubt is whether anyone will ever come such a distance to 
 order a boat or a brig ; and whether it would really pay to bring 
 the timber out so far as this ' 
 
 ' Good heavens !' said Loswa again. 
 
 ' Why are you so surprised 1 ' she said, looking at him in 
 perplexity. 
 
 ' How can you think about timber and shipwrights ? ' he 
 said, irrationally enough he knew. 'What a life for you! I 
 thought you loved Racine and Coi'neille.' 
 
 ' But there is no one else here who loves them,' she answered 
 with a little sigh. ' It is only making money that they care about 
 • — money — always money — and when itis made nobody enjoys it.' 
 
 ' But who can oblige you to marry tliis man of St. Tropez ? ' 
 
 She ruffled her hair, not very well knowing what to reply. 
 
 * It is decided so,' she answered at last. 
 
 ' But many things are decided for us which we do not accept. 
 No one has any right to dispose of our own future against our 
 own will.' 
 
 She looked vaguely troubled : the sense of herself as of an 
 independent entity had never before presented itself to her. 
 
 ' All those things are settled for one,' she said with some 
 impatience. ' It is not worth talking about. Whetiier it is 
 Gros Louis or another, it is the same to me. They are all stupid, 
 they all smoke, they all drink when they can, they all say there 
 is no God, and that there must never be any kings. They are 
 all just alike.' 
 
 She was not conscious of the sombre revolt and vague con- 
 tempt which were at work in her as the heat of the distant 
 thunder cloud dulls slightly the sunny blue of a June sky. *
 
 OTIIMAR. 69 
 
 ' But there is anotlier world tliau theirs,' said Loswa. 
 
 ' Out of tlie books % ' 
 
 ' Yes, beside the dreamland of the books. All the earth 
 is not peopled with shipwrights and skippers. There is a 
 world ' 
 
 He hesitated, for he was afraid of alarming her ; it seemed 
 to him that, Avere she disjjleased, she would send him spinning 
 down the cliff with short ceremony. 
 
 ' There is a world where life is always en je,te, where women 
 are treated not as goods and chattels and beasts of burden, but 
 as sovereigns and sox'ceresses ; where you yourself ' 
 
 'I shall never go there,' she said, abruptly interrupting him. 
 ' Do not talk about it. It makes me restless. I feel as I do 
 when I look over there.' 
 
 She pointed northward, where the unseen shore was. 
 
 ' I see the sun shine on the mountains, and I see a dazzle of 
 gold, a gleam of white, a long low line under the blue of the 
 hills, and I know that is what they call the world, the big 
 world ; but I never land there ; it is not for me.' 
 
 ' Let me take you,' he said softlJ^ 
 
 ' No,' she said with petulance and resolution. 'Grandfather 
 does not allow me ever to see the mainland without him ; he 
 says it is accursed, that the people are all mad. And now, as 
 you have eaten and drunk all you will, it will be best that you 
 should go : he may return any time, and he does not love 
 strangers.' 
 
 ' But I may come back and bring you your portrait ? ' 
 
 Her eyes smiled, but she said carelessly, ' That can be as 
 you like. You are very welcome to what you have had. I will 
 show you the way to the shore, though I dare say you would 
 tind it again by yourself.' 
 
 He endeavoured to linger, but she gave him no leisure to do 
 so. She escorted him to the edge of the steep descent, and 
 there bade him a decided adieu. 
 
 Loswa, with all his grace and ease and habits of the world, 
 felt at a loss before this child. He would have kissed her hand 
 in farewell, but her arms were folded on her chest as she stood 
 on the rock above him, and nodded to him a good-humoured 
 good-bye ; cheerfully, indifferently, as any boy of her years 
 might have done. 
 
 'It is easy to see that you come frjm Paris!' she called 
 after him, watching his descent along the j;a«sere/?e with a 
 kindly little laugli at the hesitation of his steps. 
 
 ' Let her marry Gros Louis ! ' he thought angrily as that 
 clear childish laughter echoed through the sunlit air from above 
 his head. ' I have her portrait — that is all that matters.' 
 
 What a feature of the next year's Salon would be that bril- 
 liant, bold head when it should be hung in the full light of. a,
 
 70 OTHMAR. 
 
 May day, for all Pai-is to gaze upon, marked ' D'apres Nature* 
 £-,nd signed Loswa ! 
 
 He soon, despite his indolent limbs, which were more used 
 to the boulevards than the sand and the shingle, regained his 
 boat, and pushed it in deep water. 
 
 iJamaris Be'rarde stood above on the brow of the cliff, 
 amongst the olive-boughs and the great leaves of the fig-trees, 
 looking towards that pale golden far-off shore where 'the world' 
 was a world with other men than Raphael and Gros Louis, with 
 other fruits than the round orange and the black olive, with 
 other music than the tinkle of the throat-bells of the goats. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Two days later Loswa entered the drawing-rooms of St. Phara- 
 mond, bearing with him a covered panel, which, after liis 
 ceremonious salutation of his hostess, he uncovered and placed 
 on an unocupied easel befere her. 
 
 ' Ah ! my charming sea-born savage ! ' said Nadine as she 
 approached it. 
 
 It still looked only a sketch, but it is a very sincere man 
 who will display a sketch without touching it up and embellish- 
 ing it, and Loswa was not sincere in that waj% or in many 
 others. He had copied his original drawing done upon the 
 island, enlarging and improving it, and, though the portrait 
 had the look of an impromptu creation, an impn's/ion vivid and 
 masterly, it was in reality the product of many hours of pains- 
 taking labour and elaborate thought. Produced however it 
 might be, it was one of the most brilliant studies whicli had 
 ever come from his hand. It was not idealised or made arti- 
 ficial ; it was the licad of the girl as he had seen it in the full 
 light of the morning on Bonaventure. The eyes liad tlie frank, 
 fearless, childish regard which hers had, and tlie wliole face 
 seemed speaking with cf'urage, ardour, health, and imagination. 
 
 There was a chorus of admiration fi'om all the great pen])le 
 who were there ; it was her joiir, and the rooms were full. 
 Anything drawn by Loswa instantly elicited the homage of tliat 
 world of fasliion in wliich his powers were deemed godlike, and 
 this sketch had qualities so rare and true that even his enemies 
 and hostile critics would have been forced to concede to it a 
 gi'eat triumph of art. 
 
 ' You have succeeded,' said Nadine, as she put out her hand 
 to liim with a smile. ' You were right and I was wrong. You 
 liave painted the portrait witliout spoiling it by any aflectations. 
 No living painter could liave done it better, and few dead ones.' 
 
 Loswa inclined his graceful person to the ground before her,
 
 OTHMAR. Y\ 
 
 and murmured liis undying gratitude for the condescension of 
 lier praise. 
 
 ' Tout de meme, elle me le paiera,^ he thought, remembering 
 the words she had spoken to him on the sea-terrace. 
 
 'And how did Perseus find Andromeda? ' she asked. 'It 
 must be a story to be told in verse in the old fashion. Re- 
 late it ! ' 
 
 ' There has been very little romance about it,' said Loswa, 
 'and Andromeda, alas! is contentedly going to marry a boat- 
 builder, stout, ugly, and old ! ' 
 
 ' My dear Loris, that will be for you to pi'event,' said Nadine, 
 still gazing at the sketch. ' I liave never seen a face with more 
 character or more suggestion. Cest un tfpe, as the novelists say. 
 If she do marry the boat-builder, he will have a stormy existence. 
 There are daring and genius in her face. Come — sit there and 
 narrate your adventures with her. ' 
 
 Never vmwilling to be the hero of his own stories, Loswa 
 seated himself where she bade him, and, becoming the centre of 
 a circle of lovely ladies, he embellished and heightened the 
 narrative of his expedition to Bonaventure as he had done the 
 sketch, making his own part in it more romantic, and the recep- 
 tion of Damaris warmer than either had been. He had a very 
 picturesque fashion of sjieech, and the little incident, under his 
 skilful treatment, obtained the grace and the colour of a story 
 of Ludovic Hale'vy's. The portrait could not open its lips and 
 contradict him. Only his hostess thought to herself, with 
 amusement : ' I wonder how much of all that is true ! ' 
 
 Whilst he was talking and drawing towards a close in his 
 admirably-coloured narrative, Melville and Othmar together 
 entered the room behind him, and the former caught the name 
 of his favourite of the isle. 
 
 He listened in silence till Loswa paused to take breath at the 
 end of a sentence ; then, with a very angry gleam in his clear 
 eyes, he interposed : 
 
 ' So, M. Loswa, you have found the latitude and longitude 
 of Bonaventure without a pilot ! Your portrait on that easel is 
 very like, but I confess I do not recognise the same verisimili- 
 tude in your naiTative.' 
 
 Loswa, who had paused to meditate on the end of his 
 adventure, which he felt could not be told with the tame finale 
 which it had had in real life, was disconcerted, and for a moment 
 silent. 
 
 ' I have seen your heroine this morning,' pursued Melville ; 
 ' I am distressed to disturb your romance, but she is not the 
 mingling of Gretchen and Graziella you have just described. I 
 left her busied in feeding the pigs.' 
 
 ' I dare say Gretchen and Graziella both fed pigs,' said 
 Loswa with some ill-humour. ' At least, Monsignor, you will
 
 72 OTHMAR. 
 
 admit that I have proved to the Countess Othmar that I ■war 
 capable of making a study of the betrothed of Gros Louis.' 
 
 ' That is feeding the pigs with pearls indeed,' said Isadine. 
 
 'The pigs are a better destiny than many another,' said 
 Melville. 
 
 ' You cannot seriously think so % ' 
 
 ' I do, indeed. If you had seen the dark side of life, 
 Madame, as I have done, you would think so too.' 
 
 ' No, never. That young girl has genius, or something very 
 like it, in her face. I will send for her, and show het that 
 there are other fates possible for a young Hebe with the brows 
 of Athene.' 
 
 'That would be a crael kindness if you like,' said Othmar, 
 who had been attentively studying the portrait. 
 
 'And that is for once a commonplace remark, my dear 
 Otho. Nothing which takes the band off the eyes is really 
 unkind.' 
 
 ' I do not know,' said Othmar. * Great ladies like you have 
 pets which are not the happier fated for the petting ; tlie dog is 
 shaved and frizzed, the bird is caged and killed, the marmoset 
 is adored and neglected ; if they were all left to their natural 
 fates they would be less honoured but longer lived. Yonder 
 palms are honoured too, no doubt, by being allowed to stand in 
 a corner of your room behind a lacquered screen and in a gilded 
 basket, but they have neither light nor air, and will be dead, 
 and when they are so, will be replaced in a month.' 
 
 She smiled. 'How little you know about it! and what 
 perilous things metaphors always are ! The palms go back to 
 their glass-houses and thrive as well as they did befure, while 
 other palms take their place in my rooms. You talk a little like 
 a Socialist lecturer ; your arguments are all invectives and — ■ 
 what is the logician's word % — pathetic fallacies ! ' 
 
 ' Which is the glass-house to which you could send any 
 human being whom you had taken from obscurity and content- 
 ment % ' 
 
 'The glass-house is the world, which is always ready for 
 novelties as the hothouses are ready for new seedlings. How 
 can you tell that this handsome child may not be destined to 
 make the world her slave ? ]5esides, even in the interests of 
 Gros Louis himself, it is as well that the consciousness should 
 come before instead of after.' 
 
 ' And certainly,' said Loswa, ' no one can say that Gros 
 Louis is a fate meet for this exquisite child \ ' 
 
 Melville hesitated : ' Gros Louis is not a very admirable 
 person ; he is an unbeliever, of course very avaricious, and of a 
 rough coarse exterior ; but lie is a good-teini)ered man and a 
 very laborious worker. On the whole, worse things might 
 happen to Damax'is Bcrarde than to live always on her island
 
 OTHMAR. 73 
 
 and rear her children there, as she now rears her poussins and 
 her puppies.' 
 
 ' That is looked at from a very low plane, Monsignor ; 
 imusually low for you.' 
 
 ' I can imagine so many things worse for her, that is all,' 
 said Melville, with an apology in his tone. ' Certainly she 
 ought to have a mate like a shepherd in Theocritus' pastorals, 
 but as those shepherds exist not, at least this side of the 
 Alps ' 
 
 ' Why a shepherd at all ? ' 
 
 'Because they are better than hunters,' said Melville curtly. 
 
 Loswa smiled. 
 
 'Monsignor is prejudiced to-day,' said his hostess. 'De- 
 cidedly this Galatea must be worth seeing, and the island itself 
 sounds idyllic. I did not know there was anything so near us 
 still so like Eernardin de St. Pierre. Dear Melville, go and 
 bring your treasure to us just as she is ; just as Loswa has 
 sketched her, red cap, bare feet, and striped sea-gown. The 
 moment these people are endimancJiees they are horrible.' 
 
 'She does not belong to "those people,"' said Melville, a 
 little imiiatiently. 'Her mother was an actress of Paris. 1 
 think you might dress her how you would, slie would look well. 
 She has a patrician look like tliose girls of Magna Grecia, who 
 are as ignorant as the stones they tread, but have the prn't of 
 goddesses. ' 
 
 'I will see this especial young goddess,' said Nadine, who 
 never relinquished a whim when it encountered ox^position. 
 
 Melville was seriously annoyed. 
 
 ' Will you make Gros Louis more acceptable to her 1 ' he said 
 angrily. 
 
 ' No ; we shall make him impossible.' 
 
 ' You will create one more dedassee, then, when there are 
 already so many ! ' 
 
 ' What ] By seeing her once 1 ' 
 
 'Yes,' replied Melville with a certain sternness. 'Once is 
 enough. Discontent is born at a touch. Content is a thing 
 which no one can create ; but discontent almost anyone can 
 bring about with a word. Merely to see you, Madame, would 
 be to render this poor child wretched and ashamed all the 
 rest of her days. I mean no compliment ; only a fact. You 
 float in the very empyrean of culture ; you can only make 
 this young barbarian conscious of her barbarianism. What is 
 the curse of our age? That every class is wretched because 
 it is straining forever on tiptoe, striving to reach into the class 
 above it.' 
 
 ' Dear Monsignor, I think they always did. Colbert stretched 
 the draper's yard measure till it reached the throne, and Wolsey 
 stood on the chopping-block till he was tall enough to touch
 
 74 OTHMAR. 
 
 hands with king and pope. It is nothing new, though modem 
 democracy thinks it is.' 
 
 'Tlie just ambition of the man of genius is not the restless 
 monomania of tlie dedassce.' 
 
 ' Who can tell what amhition may lie under this Phrygian 
 cap ?' said his tormentor, as she hjoked once more at the sketch 
 of Damaris. ' Dear Monsignor, I am so delighted when you 
 become a little cross ! It makes us feel that, after all, you are 
 really human ! ' 
 
 ' I am exceedingly cross,' said Melville ; 'or, to speak more 
 truly, infinitely distressed.' 
 
 'After all, Monsignor, it is not absolutely just to this in- 
 voluntary recluse never to give her an occasion to estimate Gros 
 Louis at his actual worth. According to what you and Loswa 
 say, there are the gases of revolt already smouldering in her ; 
 surely it will be better for them to take tl ime before than after.' 
 
 ' There are a great many lives,' said Melville, witli a tinge of 
 personal bitterness, ' in which those gases are never extinct, yet 
 in which they are, nevertheless, not allowed to come to the 
 surface and take fire. It may very well be so with hers.' 
 
 ' Oh, the cruelty of a priest ! Decidedly you will not let 
 her come to us if you can help it. Well, we will go to her. I 
 owe her an apology.' 
 
 Melville trusted to his usual exjierience of his hostess ; he 
 knew that with her, very often, a caprice ardently desired at 
 sunset was forgotten by sunrise ; that, in default of opposition, 
 sucli a mere whim as this would most likely expire as soon as 
 conceived. He said nothing more to her, and Loswa took his 
 sketcl: down from the easel. 
 
 'I fear you are angry with me, Monsignor,' he murmured to 
 IMelville, to whom he was always courteous and deferential. 
 ' Indeed, but for the challenge tliat Madame Nadoge cast at me, 
 I should not have ventured to lind out your inviolate isle.' 
 
 ' There is no harm done,' said Melville cuptly. ' You will 
 not find there either Gretchen or Gra/.iella.' 
 
 Otlimar had no symi)athy with this new fancy. 
 
 ' ^\'it]l all the world at your feet, what can you want with 
 a fisher-girl ] ' he said, when they were alone, to his wife, who 
 replied : 
 
 ' She may be original and amuse me. There is hard)}' anj-- 
 tliing original in these days. One never sees anything ; and I 
 do not think she is a fisher-girl. She may even be a genius— an 
 Aimee Dcscle'e — a Rachel.' 
 
 'And do 3'ou think it is better to be a Desclee than to livo 
 and die, a hai)py wife and mother, ot honue honrgeoiseV 
 
 ' Oh, my dear, it is you who are luninjcois if you see any- 
 thing enviable in the prose of Fate ! You may be sure that, if 
 she be a genius, and I help to open her pi-ison dooi's, I am only
 
 OTHMAR. ^5 
 
 the instrument of Destiny. Someone else would open them if 
 not I.' 
 
 ' I thought 3'ou always ridiculed the idea of Destiny % ' 
 
 ' For ordinary mortals— yes. But genius is accompanied by 
 the Parcfe. It cannot escape them. Men may kill the body of 
 Chatterton, but they cannot prevent the dead boy being greater 
 than they.' 
 
 ' I think your project cruel,' said Othmar. ' If you go to 
 this child, or bring her here, you will interfere unwarrantably 
 with her peace and quietude, you will take her out of her 
 sphere ; and you can never make a dedassce happy. Melville is 
 quite right.' 
 
 ' A dedassce ! My dear Otho, what a very conventional 
 reply. A dedassce is a person uprooted from her own sphere, to 
 be placed in, or to long to be placed in, one for which she is not 
 the least adapted. Genius is much more than adapted, it is 
 armed in advance for any world it choose to take as its own. 
 Rachel was an unlettered and unwashed Jewess, and Descle'e 
 was a tattered little Bohemian : but the one ruled the v/orld, 
 and the other made it weep like a child ! ' 
 
 ' But I do not know why you should suppose this little girl 
 on her island is necessarily destined to possess genius ? ' 
 
 ' It is in her face, and it would be amusing to discover it. 
 It would give one a Marco Polo sort of feeling.' 
 
 ' It is a dangerous kind of exploration. You cannot tell 
 what mischief may not come out of it.' 
 
 ' And you do not understand that the supreme charm of a 
 caprice lies precisely in never knowing in the least what one 
 may come out of it.' 
 
 ' But where your toys are human souls ' 
 
 ' There are no such things as human souls. It is an exploded 
 expression. There arc only conglomerates of gases and tissues, 
 moved by automatic action, and adhering together for a few 
 years, more or less. That is the new creed. It is not an ex- 
 hilarating one, but il envaut bicn un autre.'' 
 
 ' All this does not explain why you have taken a fancy to 
 disturb the destiny of a little girl whom you have seen once in a 
 boat.' 
 
 ' Because, I think it may amuse me ; all original creatures 
 and unconventional types are amusing for a little time at any 
 rate.' 
 
 'Oh,' said Othmar, half in jest and half in earnest, 'when 
 you have once taken the idea that anything is amusing, I know 
 cities may burn and men may die, you will not relinquish your 
 idea till you have exhausted it.' 
 
 ' No. I do not think I easily relinquish my ideas ; it is only 
 weak people who do that. It is true few ideas live long ; they 
 are all belles du joitr, the bloom of a day.
 
 76 OTHMAR. 
 
 Melville had for once erred in liis estimate of his hostess. 
 As tenacious when she was opposed as she was indifferent when 
 ■unopposed, she that evening announced her intention of taking 
 Loswa as her pilot, and of going in person to B,<naventure. 
 
 The opijosition of Melville, and of her husband, the attrac- 
 tion of something new, and that charm which always existed 
 for her in the discovery and examination of anything unusual 
 in human nature, all contributed to make her dwell on an idea 
 which, had it not been opposed, might probably have nevei 
 taken serious shape. 
 
 The master passion of her temperament remained the plea- 
 sure she took in the excitation and the analysis of character. 
 She had always liked to bring about singular scenes, unusual 
 situations, strange emotions, merely for the sake of observing 
 tliem with the same subtle and intellectual pleasure, as a 
 writer of romance feels in the complications and characters 
 which he creates at will, and at will destroys. She had always 
 brought about a perilous position when she could do so, because 
 to enter upon one was as agreeable to her as it is to a good 
 mountaineer to ascend to perilous heights. She had been often 
 tempted to regret her own jjliysical coldness, which rendered 
 such heat of emotion and of danger as d'Aubiac's royal mistress 
 had known impossible to her. It was less the tragedy of passion 
 than the psychological intricacies of character which interested 
 her. ' Tons Ics amourenx sont betes,'' she had so often said, and so 
 continually thouglit. Of all things which had bored her tlirougli- 
 out her life the love of the male human animal had bored 
 her the most. 
 
 But a complicated situation, a set of emotions on an ascend- 
 ing scale — a sjjectacle of troubled consciences and of disturbing 
 elements — tliese it had always diverted her to watch, calm and 
 untouched by them as any marble statue which looks from a 
 glass window upon a storm at sea. In the language which slie 
 used the most, she said to herself that she would have given 
 nearly all she possessed to be for once ' cmpoignce ' by an intense 
 emotion. 
 
 Sometimes she WDuld look at Othniar and think : ' It is not 
 his fault ; it has certainly not been his fault, and yet there has 
 never been a second wlien my heart beat really any quicker for 
 his coming.' In the highest heights of his own exaltation and 
 ecstasy he had always left her irresponsive. ' Vou wantMignon 
 or Juliet for all that,' she liad said to liim once. 
 
 It amused her now ; this fancy of that unknown little island 
 lying liidden in these gay and crowded seas. She had a fancy 
 to see it and to divert herself with the human creature on it 
 who she had said was ' mi tiipi'.' In the afternoon of the follow- 
 ing day she sailed thither. Who could have hoped for an un- 
 discovered isle on these crowded seas ? She was accompanied
 
 :OTHMAR. 77 
 
 by Betliune, Loswa, and three other of her courtiers. Othmar 
 refused to condone what he did not approve ; and Melville had 
 been suddenly called away to Rome. 
 
 ' To the new Desclee ! ' she said, as her j'acht glided out 
 of its harbour and bore southward through smooth sparkling 
 sapphire waters. 
 
 ' A name of melancholy omen,' said Gui de Bethune. ' Some- 
 times I think Aimee Descle'e is the most pathetic figure of our 
 century.' 
 
 ' She was a sensitive, and she Avas a jwitrinaire,' answered 
 Nadine with her sceptical little smile. ' What does physiology 
 tell us ? That genius is only a question of brain tissue and 
 blood-globules, and that the Mois de Mai and the Fromethen.s 
 UiLhonnd are only the consequence of a kind of disease. It is 
 so consoling for us ; who have no disease, perhaps, bub have 
 also, alas, no genius ! That is why the world is so fond of the 
 i:)hysiologists. They are the great consolers of all mediocrity.' 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Damaris was gathering oranges and carrying them to the pack- 
 ing-sheds. She was bearing an empty skip upon her head, and 
 kicking one of the golden balls before her through the grass, 
 w'hen a woman, inilike any woman that she had seen before, 
 appeared to her astonished eyes amidst the emerald foliage of 
 the orange-boughs and the lilac of the hepaticas which filled the 
 gi ass. 
 
 ' I am sure you know me again 1 ' said the sweetest and 
 coldest of, voices. ' I am come to apologise to you for my rude- 
 ness. Here is Loswa, who is afraid to approach you ; he will 
 vouch for me.' 
 
 Damaris stood still and mute ; she put the basket off her 
 head, and looked in blank stupor at her visitant ; her colour 
 came and went painfully ; all in a moment she seemed to her- 
 self to grow ugly, awkward, coarse, foolish, ever3'thing which 
 was hideous and painful. She had no words at her command, 
 she might have been born dumb. No man had any power to 
 confuse her, but this beautiful woman paralysed her every 
 nerve. 
 
 'lam come to apologise to you for my involuntary rudeness,' 
 said her visitant in her sweetest manner. ' Your rebuke was 
 apt and very deserved, but you may be sure that, had I really 
 seen you I should not have incurred it.' 
 
 ' It was I who was rude,' said Damaris, with her clieeka 
 scarlet. 
 
 Loswa had been unable to embarrass her, but a crwel gon-
 
 78 OTHMAR. 
 
 fusion possessed her before this woman, who was so unlike her- 
 self, who was so languid, so delicate, so marvellous. 
 
 'Not that she is so very beautiful either,' thought the child 
 even in her bewilderment. ' But she is — she is — wonderful ! 
 fcihe is like those gauze-winged dragon-flies, all silver and 
 gossamer ; she is like the delicate white lilies of the tree 
 
 datura ; she is like, like 1 did not think a woman could be 
 
 like that ! ' 
 
 ' Do you forgive me ? ' said her visitor with her sweetest 
 smile. ' I did not really see you, or I should not have made 
 such a blunder — I who detest such mistakes.' 
 
 'I was rude,' stammered the girl again, with difliculty find- 
 ing her tongue, whilst her colour came and went with violence. 
 
 ' Oh no, you were justly on the defensive. You were 
 offended, and took a just reprisal ; the only one in your power. 
 My dear child, M. Loswa has shown me the sketch he made of 
 you, and told me of your hospitality to him. Will you not be 
 as hospitable to me ? I want much to make friends with you.' 
 
 The words were spoken with all the exquisite charm and 
 graciousness in which she could put such magic, when she 
 chose, that no one living would have resisted them, and all such 
 little courage or such vague prejudice as might have moved 
 Damaris against her melted before them like little snowflakes in 
 spring before the sun amidst the lilac-buds. 
 
 ' If Madame will honour me,' she stammered, not even see- 
 ing the men who wei-e present, only thinking of her own rough 
 gown, of her tumbled hair, of the state of the house filled with 
 wood smoke, as the oven Avas getting ready for tlie baking ; of 
 the lines of washed linen that were stretching from one wall to 
 another. 
 
 ' How did Clevis let you pass ? ' she said, struck with a 
 sudden thought. 
 
 ' Clovis knew me again,' said Loswa. ' Besides, a man was 
 at the foot of the pm^sereUe, and brouglit us up to you.' 
 
 ' He did not do his duty,' said tlie girl with a little frown, 
 which drew togctlier her pencilled eyebrows. 
 
 ' The man or the dog?' asked Nadine, amused. 
 
 ' Neither,' said Damaris. She was angered, though she did 
 not divine how many napolecms liad passed into Rapliael's liand, 
 who had been pruning olives, and had had much trouble to 
 hold back the faitliful Clovis, for whom gold had no charm. 
 
 ' If Brunehildt had not been shut up with lier puppies,' she 
 added regretfully ; ' she is much more savage tlian Ch)vis.' 
 
 ' You seem very sorrowful that we did not all liave the fate 
 of Penelope's suitors,' said Nadine, much amused. ' We are 
 the friends of Monsignor INIelville ; may not that fact protect 
 us ? Is your grandfather at home 1 ' 
 
 No ; he was away in the eloop ; gone to St. Jean with a
 
 OTHMAR. 79 
 
 cargo. Damaris did not add that he would have been much 
 worse to pass than even Brunehiklt. 
 
 ' But I pray you come into the house, Madame,' she added, 
 her natural courtesy gaining the ascendancy over her embarrass- 
 ment. ' It is a poor place, but there is a tine view, and if I had 
 only known ' 
 
 'You would have been endimanchce and hideous,' thought 
 Nadine, as she answered with her sweetest grace that she would 
 go willingly to that Ijalcony of the beauties of which she had 
 heard so much fi'om Loswa. 
 
 ' All her eyes are for me,' she whispered to Bethune. ' She 
 does not see that any of you exist.' 
 
 ' I suppose,' rejoined Bethune, ' that we, after all, do not 
 differ so very much from Raphael and Gros Louis ; but between a 
 woman and a woman of the world there is as much difference as 
 between a raw egg and a sourjle, between a hen and a peahen.' 
 
 ' You might find a more poetic comparison ; say a poppy and 
 a gardenia,' said Nadine smiling. ' She is not at the age to 
 think of you. Have patience ; fa viendra. She is really very 
 handsome, lovelier than Loswa's sketch.' 
 
 Damaris, meanwhile, was thinking with agony that there 
 were ready no cakes, no cream, no white bread, nothing which 
 this delicate and ethereal visitant would be able to touch — ■ 
 thinking of the linen swinging in the wind, and of the bacon 
 grey with smoke, and of Catherine, who, on washing-days, was 
 in her crossest mood ! 
 
 Nadine, with that swift intuition into, the thoughts of others 
 which made her the most sympathetic of companions where she 
 deigned to be sympathetic at all, guessed what was passing 
 through the girl's mind, and hastened to relieve her embarrass- 
 ment by asking to be pei^mitted to remain out of doors, alleging 
 that the air was so soft and the scent of the orange-blossoms so 
 sweet, that she was reluctant to leave either. 
 
 ' Will Madame really prefer it i ' said Damaris, unable to 
 conceal her relief. 
 
 ' There is the same view to be seen from here,' she added as 
 she opened a door in the wall and showed them the southern 
 sea stretching far away, shining blue and violet through arches 
 of olive-boughs lying all hushed and bright and warm in the 
 glow of the afternoon sun. 
 
 Then she caught a little boy by the shoulder, the son of 
 Raphael, who was looking on stupidly. 
 
 ' Run and bring some wine and some fruit,' she whispered 
 to him, ' and ask Catherine to send the old silver.' 
 
 Her sense of the obligations of hospitality was stronger than 
 the dread of her great lady. 
 
 ' It is not because she is great,' she told herself, angry with 
 her own timidity. ' But she is so wonderful, so wonderful ! '
 
 8o OTHMAR. 
 
 That siii?rcme distinction in the wife of Othmar, which, 
 when she walked down a throne-room, made half the other 
 "women there look vulgar, had its charm even for this child, who 
 could not have given a name to the superiority which awed and 
 fascinated her, even whilst it made her ready to hide her head 
 beneath the stones like the lizards. 
 
 Nadine, pleased with everything, or so professing herself, 
 sat on a stone bench within sight of the sea and quartered a 
 mandarin orange with her white fingers, Avhilst the sun played 
 on the jewels of her great rings. 
 
 ' Of all your many conquests, perhaps you have had none 
 more flattering than the adoration and amazement of this child,' 
 whispered Be'thune to her. 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 'And I should not think,' she answered, 'that she was by 
 nature easily daunted or easily impressed. She has reigned 
 hero, the innocent Alcina of a bucolic paradise. She has cha- 
 racter, whether she have genius or no. Look how coolly she 
 puts poor Loswa aside ! As he discovered Alcina, it Avill behard 
 on him if he be not her Rinaldo ! ' 
 
 ' You are kinder to him tlian to her,' said Be'thune. 
 
 ' You always think ill of him.' 
 
 ' I think of his character much as I do of his art.' 
 
 ' Surely his art is admirable ? ' 
 
 ' It is clever ; it is not sincere.' 
 
 * My dear Duke, is not that a little hypercritical ? You 
 moan that it is a mannerism.' 
 
 ' And what is a mannerism but an affectation ? And what is 
 an affectation but a want of truth ? ' 
 
 ' That is a wide subject. I cannot discuss it with you just 
 now, because I want to speak to tliis child. — My dear, I am a 
 ni ighbour of yours ; I live on the coast which you see every 
 day ; will you come and stay a few hours with me \ We would 
 show you things Avhich would amuse you.' 
 
 ' St:iy with you \ ' 
 
 The eyes of Damaris opened to their fullest, her face flushed 
 scarlet ; she was S(j amazed that she forgot her awe of the 
 Bpeakor. 
 
 ' Why should you want me?' she said bluntly. 
 
 ' When j-iiu are older you will know that people want many 
 tilings witliout knowing why tliey warit them. J^ut I can give 
 you very good reasons : IMonsignor Melville has interested me 
 in you, and I think it a pity anyone so gifted as you are by 
 nature sliould never sec anything better than your yard-dngs 
 and — what i.s your yiVni ((''.•<■ name \ — dms Louis \ IMy ])oor child, 
 how can you know wliat it is you do with yourself ? You cannot 
 tell what the world is like.' 
 
 * I am very happy,' said Damaris,
 
 OTHMAR. 8 1 
 
 The world was a name of magic to lier. How often had she 
 not looked over the strip of sea which severed her from that 
 dazzling shore where amethystine hills and ivory snows and 
 silvery olive woods spoke of a world from which she was forever 
 severed ! 
 
 ' I would come to you if I were ever alone,' she said after a 
 pause. 
 
 'Well, come Avith us,' said her temptress smiling. * It 
 is three o'clock only now. We will take you with us for a 
 while and send you back by twilight. Loris has told you who 
 I am.' 
 
 The name of Othmar was, even to the ears of Damaris, a 
 spell of might upon those shores. She was flattered, amazed, 
 touched to intense emotion, but she stammered out that, 
 although she was most grateful, yet she dared not ; her grand- 
 father would kill her if she left the island ; he was most severe ; 
 he never forgave. 
 
 ' I promise to disarm your grandfather if that is all your 
 fear,' said Nadine, as she thought to herself, ' These good Com- 
 munists, je Zes connais ! They would string us all up to the 
 lamp-posts, if they could, and yet, when we speak to them, 
 they are in heaven ! ' 
 
 The more terrified and resolute in resistance Damaris grew, 
 the more decided was her visitant to carry her point and succeed 
 in her caprice. 
 
 ' It is really cruel,' murmured Bethune. ' The child is happy : 
 oh Madame ! why pluck this wild rose only to droop in your 
 glass-house, and be good for nothing ever afterwards 1 You can- 
 not put it back upon its stem if once you break it off ' 
 
 ' Do you think to flower for Gros Louis's buttonhole is a 
 better fate 1 ' said Nadine with amusement. ' I think you all 
 are very hard to please. Usually I never notice anybody, and 
 you say I am cruel ; when I do notice anybody you say that is 
 cruel also ! I «m just in the mood to play at being a bene- 
 factress, and you all oppose my charitable inclinations. To- 
 morrow I may not be in tlie humour.' 
 
 ' Precisely,' said Bethune. ' To-morrow you will wonder 
 what you ever saw in a hedge rose, but that will not put the 
 rose back in bloom on the hedge again.' 
 
 ' The rose will cease to bloom certainly anywhere, and that 
 is nature's fault, and not mine.' 
 
 ' I hear you love the old poets,' she said, turning to Damaris. 
 ' Will you recite something to me ? I love them too. ' 
 
 ' And you yawn before every stage in Paris ! ' murmured 
 Bethune. But Damaris did not hear him. 
 
 'I shall say it very ill, Madame,' she murmured. She was 
 diffident, terrified indeed ; yet her vague consciousness that she 
 had some sort of power in her, as the lark had, as the night- 
 
 G
 
 82 OTHMAR. 
 
 ingale had, made the old remembered poetry come thronging in 
 her brain and trembling on her lij)s as she spoke of it. 
 
 ' If, after all, I have talent ? ' she thouglit, her heart seeming 
 to beat up to her throat. 
 
 ' Give us something from Esther,' said her visitor ; ' that is 
 the one play permissible to young girls.' 
 
 Damaris smiled, as if at the name of a dear friend. Those 
 verses, which generation aftei generation of children have 
 spoken since the young disciples of the early years of St. Cyr 
 lirst wept over the perils of the Jewish heroine, were amongst 
 those which most touched her heart and pleased her imagina- 
 tion. Unknown to herself, she had something of the sense of 
 loneliness of an exile, of an alien, on this little island, which 
 yet she loved so well. 
 
 ' Voyons, voyons!' said Nadine impatiently, not accustomed 
 to, or tolerant of, being made to wait. ' Do not be afraid. I 
 will tell you frankly whether you have any artistic aptitude, or 
 whether you had better stay and gather oranges and never open 
 a poem all your life. These gentlemen will flatter you, but I 
 shall not. Voyons ! ' 
 
 She spoke imperatively, and with the imperial air of her 
 most resolute will. Damaris grew very pale, even to her lips, 
 but she did not dare refuse to obey. She opened her mouth 
 once, twice, with a deep-drawn, fluttering, frightened breath ; 
 then she began to recite, with tremulous voice, the 
 
 Notre ennemi cruel devant vous se declare : 
 
 C'est hii, c'cst le miuistre infidcle et barbare 
 
 Qui, d'un zele trompeur a vos yeux revetu, 
 
 Contre uotre innocence arma votre vertu. 
 
 Et quel autre, grand Dieu ! qu'un Scythe impitoyable 
 
 Aurait de tant d'horreurs dicte I'ordre effroyable? 
 
 and passed on to the passage, 
 
 Dieu, coufonds I'audace et rimposture ! 
 
 At first licr timidity was so great that she was almost in- 
 audible, but at tlie fifth and sixtli lines the charm wliich the words 
 possessed for her began to absorl) her thoughts, to take her out 
 of herself into the ix-gion of poetic feeling, to spur and stimulate 
 and strengthen her. Nature liad given her tones full of tender- 
 ness and power, and capable of many vai'ying emotions, and the 
 dramatic instinct, wliicli was either inherited or innate in her, 
 made her give wholly unconsciously the just expres.sion, the 
 true emphasis, the accent which best aided the meaning of the 
 verse, and best shaped its harmonics and grace. 
 
 Her first embarrassment once passed, the animation and 
 spirit natural to her returned ; her intuitive perception made 
 her lend the required force and feeling to each verse ; she could
 
 OTHMAR. 83 
 
 have recited the whole of the play with ease, so familiar to her 
 were the lines of all the few volumes she j^ossessed. Night after 
 night, in her little balcony, when everyone slept except herself 
 and the nightingales, she had declaimed the speeches siAio voce 
 for her own delight, living for the hour in the scenes they sug- 
 gested, and forgetting all the more sordid details of the existence 
 which surrounded her, seeing only the moon and the sea and 
 the orange flowers. At any other time her meridional accent, 
 her childish exaggeration of emphasis, and southerner's excess 
 of gesture, would have incurred the ridicule of her hypercritical 
 auditor. But now the critic was in the mood to be kind and to 
 be easily pleased. She closed her ears to the defects, and only 
 noted with appi'obation the much there was to praise and to 
 approve in the untaught recitation of a girl of fifteen, who had 
 never seen a stage or heard a recital in the whole of her short 
 life. 
 
 Damaris paused abruptly, and with a startled look, like one 
 awakened out of dreamland into rough reality. 
 
 'I beg your pardon, I forgot myself,' she said stupidly, not 
 well knowing what she meant and hardly where she was. 
 
 She did not hear the eager praises of the gentlemen about 
 her ; she only heard the sweet cool voice of the woman who was 
 her judge, and who had listened in impassive silence : 
 
 ' My dear, you have talent,' said that voice. ' Perhaps you 
 have even genius. With all that music in your shut soul you 
 must not marry Gros Louis.' 
 
 Damaris looked at her wistfully, Avith all the colour hot in 
 her face, and her heart beating visibly. Then, she could not 
 have told her why, she burst into tears. 
 
 ' Une aaisitive ! ' mui'mured her visitant a little impatiently. 
 'You see, my dear Duke! — it is Aimee Descle'e, not Rachel; 
 Adi-ienne Lecouvreur, not Mile. JMars.' 
 
 ' The greater pity then to take her from her orange-groves,' 
 answered Bethune. ' What will Paris or the world give that 
 will compensate for all her loss ! ' 
 
 Damaris did not hear. With shame at her own emotion, 
 and unwillingness that it should be pitied or observed, she had 
 turned away, and had been sobbing silently over the ui^lifted 
 head and questioning face of Clovis, who had come upward to 
 ins^iect the strangers. 
 
 ' If Esther can move her so greatly,' said Nadine with her 
 little ironical smile, 'what will Dona Sol do and Marion de 
 rOrme ? ' 
 
 'I do not think,' said Bethune, 'that it is Esther which 
 moves her now ; it is your abrupt revelation to her of her own 
 powers. Surely to discover you have genius must be like dis- 
 covering that you have a snake in your breast and eternal life 
 in your hand.'
 
 84 OTHMAR. 
 
 She laughed, and went to where Damaris stood with the 
 dog, striving to conquer her weakness. 
 
 'My dear child, surely you cannot weep for Gros Louis? 
 Nay, I understand ; 1 startled you because I told you that if 
 you study and strive you can do great things. I believe so. 
 If you wish I will help you to do them.' 
 
 The girl was silent. So immense was the vision which 
 opened before her, and so enormous to her fancy were the 
 perils and difficulties which stretched between her and this 
 promised land, that she was mute from awe and from amaze- 
 ment. 
 
 Always to dwell on Bonaventure, always to steer and sail 
 on the sea, always to gather the olives and oranges, always to 
 see the sun rise over the wild shores of Italy and set over the 
 coast of Spain far away in immeasurable golden distances, 
 always to run up and down the rocks like the goats, and swim 
 like the dolphins, and go to bed with the birds and get up with 
 them — this had been the only life she had known. For the 
 moment she could attain no conception of any other. She had 
 seen the churches at Villefranche and Eza, and she had seen 
 the building yards of Villefranche and St. Tropez, and that 
 was all ; her only idea of the great world was of a perpetual 
 fete-day, with the priests always in their broidered canonicals, 
 and the church bells always ringing, and the people always 
 thronging in holiday attire, and going up and down sunny streets 
 noisily and laughing. 
 
 That was all she could think of ; and yet Imagination, that 
 kindliest of all the ministers of humanity, had told her there 
 must be more than this somewhere ; had filled her mind Avith 
 many dim, gorgeous, marvellous pageantries which grew up for 
 her from the black printed lines of 'Sintram' and 'The Cid.' 
 There must be something better than the Sundays of the main- 
 land And yet to leave her island seemed to her like leaving 
 
 life itself ! 
 
 All these conflicting thoughts striving together in a mind 
 which was vivid in its fancies and childish in its ignorance 
 moved her to an emotion which she could neither have con- 
 trolled nor have described ; she could find no words with which 
 to answer this great lady, who seemed to her to have thrown 
 open great golden gates before her, and let in a flood of light 
 which dazzled her, streaming on her from unknown skies. And 
 at last she yielded. 
 
 'Catherine, I am going on the sea,' she cried, as she ran 
 indoors, blushing to the roots of her hair at the subtei'fuge, for 
 she was very truthful. 
 
 The old woman, invisible for the smoke as she stooped over 
 the great oven, with the handle of its door in her hand, 
 grumbled some cross words wliich were neither assent nor
 
 OTHMAR. 85 
 
 dissent. Damaris took them as the former, and waited for no 
 more ; she passed half her life on tlie sea, the old servant would 
 find nothing strange in her absence if she were out till sunset. 
 
 ' You are sure I shall be back by Ave Maria 1 ' she said 
 timidly to her temptress. 
 
 'Certainly,' said Nadine, who knew well that it was not 
 possible. 
 
 ' I am sure I ought not to come,' said the girl wistfully. 
 
 Her temptress smiled a little. 
 
 ' Oh, my dear, if you be as feminine as you look, that 
 consideration will only add la jMinte a la sauce.' 
 
 Damaris gazed at her with pathetic, impassioned eyes. She 
 did not understand ; she said nothing ; she only sighed. 
 
 ' Come,' said the enchantress. 
 
 ' I think Othmar was right. It is cruel, murmured 
 Be'thune. 
 
 ' Men are always so timid,' said Nadine with her customary 
 indulgent contempt for them. ' Ignorance is not bliss, my 
 dear friend, although the copybooks say so. — Come, my pretty 
 demoiselle, come and see our enchanted coasts ; we will not 
 harm you, and we will only give you a little spray of moly such 
 as Ulysses gathered ; and perhaps a magic ring and a wishing- 
 cap, nothing worse.' 
 
 The cliild hesitated still ; she knew that she was doing very 
 wrong ; she knew that if what she was doing were discovered, 
 her grandfather's chastisement would be pitiless ; but curiosity, 
 imagination, interest, were all enlisted on the side of dis- 
 obedience, and she had a certain turbulence and ardour of 
 seK-will in her nature which had brought her many hard words 
 from Catherine, and even blows from Jean Berarde. All these 
 together conquered her conscience, her judgment, and her 
 prudence ; the gates of the enchanted world stood open ; she 
 might never pass through them, or see what was beyond them 
 unless she went now. 
 
 With that reasoning she sprang down the first ledges of the 
 stone staircase, and as lightly as a kid would have done leaped 
 from one step to the other till she reached the edge of the 
 sea. 
 
 She allowed her feet to be guided into the barge, and felt it 
 dance beneath them with a strange thrill ; it seemed all to be 
 as unreal as a chapter of ' Sintram ; ' the lovely lady who wooed 
 and tempted her appeared like a being from another world ; the 
 gilded prow, the embroidered flag, the rich awnings fringed 
 with silver wavered before her in the sunlight. 
 
 Before she had known what she had actually done, the oars 
 of the men cleft the sunshiny water, letting it flow in streams 
 of diamonds off tlieir bkules, and the vessel had already glided 
 away from her home.
 
 86 OTHMAR. 
 
 Clovis, who was accustomed never to leave the island, but 
 never failed to give voice to his grief -when he saw her leave 
 him for the sea, either by swimming or sailing, stood on the 
 strip of sand beneath the rocky steep of Bonaventure and 
 howled in dismal solitude. She put her hands to her cars not 
 to hear him ; it seemed as if he reproached and rebuked her. 
 
 Soon he became but a little white speck beneath the red 
 sandstone of the cliff, and the boat had reached the side of the 
 stately schooner which awaited them in the midst of gay sun- 
 shine and azure water, whilst a flute-player discoursed sweet 
 music from some unseen retreat. 
 
 When the island also began to recede from sight she then, 
 and only then, began to realise what she had done. 
 
 *• C'est Bcrnardin de St. -Pierre tout pur,' said Nadine, sur- 
 veying with diversion the amazement and the awe of her captive. 
 
 Nothing could be more enchantingly kind than her manner, 
 or more gentle and encouraging in its patience with the girl's 
 stupor and timidity. She had gratified her caprice, she had 
 Avon her wager, and she was sweet and gracious to the object 
 of it. Obedience had always found her benignant if at times it 
 had found her as quickly oblivious. This had been a little 
 thing indeed ; a very little thing ; but she would have been 
 irritated if it had escaped or beaten her ; would almost have 
 been mortified. 
 
 All her world had told her that to bring the girl thither 
 would be a folly if not a cruelty ; and for that reason beyond 
 all others she had persevered. 
 
 Damaris, seated in the prow of the barge, had the charm for 
 lier of representing the triumph of her own will. So might 
 some young slave, hardly acquired, on whom her fancy had 
 been strongly and Avaywardly set, have rejiresented hers to 
 Cleopatra. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 Othmau was leaning over the balustrade of the sea-tcrraco as 
 the vessel returned. He looked and saw tlic captive from 
 Bonaventure. A sort of vague pity mingled with irritation as 
 he did so. Why had Nadine brought this hapless child from 
 her safe sea silences and solitudes 1 It was a jest, but the jest 
 was cruel ; as cruel as that which tics the little living bird on 
 to the bouquet that ir, tossed from hand to hand in jests of 
 Carnival. 
 
 The poor sea-born curlew would do well enough left to its 
 own nest upon the rocks, but once taken prisoner its day was 
 done.
 
 OTHMAR. 87 
 
 There were moments when the caprices of her wayward and 
 dominant will irritated him ; when her profound indifference to 
 the consequences of any action which amused herself, and com- 
 promised others, repelled him by its coldness. What could 
 this poor little peasant be to her ? A toy for five minutes, a 
 plaything sought out of mere contradiction, and destined to be 
 cast aside ere the day was done I 
 
 He watched the graceful shape of the schooner as it boi'o 
 down upon the coast with a sense of regret as from some definite 
 misfortune whicli might have been averted by exercise of his 
 own will. But he had never used his will in any opposition to 
 his wife. 
 
 Wisely or unwisely, he had never made the slightest oppo- 
 sition to her desires or even her fancies. Begun in the blind 
 adoration of a lover, the habit of deference to her had continued 
 Avith him, not out of feebleness or uxoriousness, but out of that 
 gradual growth of custom which is one of the most potent 
 influences of life. She had power over him to make him 
 relinquish many a project, abandon many a desire, but this 
 power was not x"eciprocal ; it seldom or never is so between two 
 human beings. The old proverb, that of any twain one is 
 booted and spurred and the other saddled and bridled, has a 
 rough truth in it. 
 
 Othmar knew nothing of, and cared as little for, this girl 
 whose face looked with so frank an audacity, so wistful an 
 innocence, out of the brilliant drawing of Loswa. But he was 
 sorry that she was not let alone. He had suffered many a bitter 
 moment, even since his marriage, from the uncertainty of his 
 wife's moods, from the mutability of her fancies. Constant in 
 his own tastes, and very unwilling to wound others, her rapid 
 changes from interest to weariness, and her profound in- 
 diflerence for the bruises slie gave to tlie amour propre of her 
 fellow-creatures, frequently troubled and distressed him. He 
 was often kind to persons he disliked, to compensate them for 
 her unkindness, or to prevent them from perceiving it. 
 
 Nadine, he knew, would think this poor child of no more 
 account than the briar-rose to which he had likened her ; but 
 to him it seemed wanton and cruel to have disturbed the 
 peacefulness of her life, merely as a child casts a stone at a bird, 
 and then runs on, not even looking to see whether the bird be 
 bruised or has fallen. 
 
 ' Life is but a spectacle,' she had once said to him. ' When 
 you go to the Gymnase do you distress yourself as to whether 
 the actors catch cold at the Avings or take a contagious disease 
 in a cab as they go home 1 Of course you do not 1 Then why 
 not view life in the same manner ? People bore us or please 
 us ; that is all we are concerned with. We do not follow them 
 Lome in fact ; we need not, even in imagination.'
 
 8S OTHMAR. 
 
 But Othmar did not agree with lier. Life seemed to him 
 much more often tragedy rather than comedy ; he could not 
 divest himself of a compassion for the players, with which 
 much fellow-feeling mingled. 
 
 ' Since 1 married him he has become very amiable,' she once 
 said jestingly. ' It is due to the spirit of contradiction which 
 always exists in human nature, and which is never so strongly 
 developed as in marriage.' 
 
 It was a jest ; but there was a truth in the jest. Often he 
 felt so much irritated at his wife's indiflerence, that it stimu- 
 lated him to more interest or sympathy than he would otherwise 
 have felt on many subjects and in many persons. 
 
 As he saw the yacht approach the sea-wall now, he turned 
 away impatiently and went into the house to his books. He 
 did not choose to assist at the festive procession which \vas con- 
 ducting this poor little wild goat of the clifis to be offered upon 
 the altars of caprice and flattery. 
 
 As if, he thought, a life out of the world Avere not such an 
 enviable thing that we should be as afraid to destroy it as we 
 are afraid to break a Tanagra statuette ! 
 
 Meanwhile, unretarded by his displeasure, the schooner 
 approached as nearly as the draught of water would permit, 
 and the boat from it landed Damaris Berarde at the foot of the 
 rose-marble stairs. Bethune would have assisted her, but she 
 sprang from the boat to the landing-stair with the assured and 
 graceful agility of one who passed all her life in the open air, 
 and was practised in the free exercise of all her muscles. Her 
 eyes gazed in delighted wonder at the beauty of the place. 
 
 ' It is like Alcina's palace,' she said with a quick breath of 
 admiration. 
 
 ' What do you know of Alcina ? ' asked her hostess, amused. 
 
 ' I have read Ariosto,' she answered, and then, with her 
 extreme care for perfect truthfulness, added, ' I mean I have 
 read his poems, translated.' 
 
 ' It is rather your island which is like Alcina's,' said her 
 hostess. 
 
 Then they led her through the gardens, which seemed all a 
 maze of rose, of yelloAv, and of wl)ite from the innumerable 
 thickets of azalea which were in bloom. Here and there, out 
 of their gorgeous glow of colour, there rose the white form of a 
 statue or the white column of a fountain. The sun was still 
 high in tlie west ; the gardens seemed to laugh like children in 
 its warmth. 
 
 It was all so beautiful, so magical, so strange ; the child 
 whose imagination had been fed on poets' fancies, and had 
 grown unchecked in an almost complete solitude, expected some 
 marvellous message, some wondrous destiny to meet her thero 
 on this threshold of a new life.
 
 OTHMAR. 89 
 
 She found herself the centre of attention and of homage ; 
 everyone looked at her, spoke to her, strove to gam her notice. 
 A va,o;ue fancy came into her mind — perhaps she was a king's 
 daughter after all, like the Goose Girl in Grimm's stories, of 
 whom Melville had told her once. Anything would have 
 seemed possible to her, and nothing too incredible to happen 
 at the close of this astonishing day. 
 
 They led her into the house, which was entered from the 
 garden through conservatories filled with Asiatic and Soutli 
 American plants and gaily peopled by green paroquets and 
 rose-crested cockatoos, and scarlet cardinals, which flew at their 
 will amongst the feathery foliage. 
 
 They were all kind to her ; full of compliment and of thought- 
 fulness for her ; even her hostess took trouble to interest her, 
 to explain things to her, to make her feel that she was wel- 
 come and admired. In her serge frock and her thick shoes, 
 with her rope of pearls twisted round her throat, and her face 
 in a rose glow of surprise and of innocent vanity and pleasure, 
 she sat the centre of their interest, tlieir approval, and their 
 praise. She was a veiy picturesque figure with her short blue 
 rough gown and her scarlet worsted cap. She had twisted her 
 big pearls round her throat, and she had slipped on her Sunday 
 shoes. She was tall, and lithe, and erect ; she looked as- 
 tonished, but not intimidated. If a smile were exchanged 
 between them at her expense she did not see it, and if they 
 looked at her much as they would have done at a ouistiti or a 
 topaza pyra from wild woods, she was unconscious of it. 
 
 The whole scene was enchantment to her eyes. Her natural 
 sense of the beauties of form and of colour was at once soothed 
 and excited by the beauty of these chambers, which had all 
 the subdued glow of old jewels. It was still daylight, but rose- 
 shaded lamps were burning there, and shed a mellow hue over 
 all the brilliant colours. They brouglit her tea, and ices, and 
 bonbons, things all as strange to her as they would have been 
 to a savage from South Sea isles. 
 
 Her ignorance, her simplicity, her frank surprise amused 
 them, and tlie natural shrewdness and pertinence of her replies 
 stimulated them with the sense of a new intellectual distraction. 
 But when they i^ressed her to recite, she grew shy and silent. 
 She was not a machine to be set in action by pressure of a 
 spring ; and a certain suspicion that she had only been brought 
 here as a plaything dawned upon her ; the idea suddenly came 
 to her that these great people were amusing themselves with 
 her ignorance and astonishment, and when once that sting of 
 mortified doubt had come into her mind, peace fled, and pride 
 kept her mute and still. 
 
 Other persons came in, pretty women, and handsome men ; 
 there was a murmur of laughter and a confusion of voices in all
 
 90 OTHMAR. 
 
 the rooms. She began to feel less at her ease, less satisfied, 
 less sure of her own self. Some of the new-comers stared at 
 her and sauntered away hmghing; her one little hour of triumph 
 ■was already over ; she liad been seen, she had ceased to be a 
 novelty. 
 
 But it was too late to repent. She could not ask such 
 strangers to retrace their steps for her ; and she felt by intui- 
 tion that this luvely sovereign, with her delicate face and her 
 gracious smile, could have hucome as chill as the north wind 
 and as terrible as the white storms, were she oil'ended by 
 cajirice or ingratitude. 
 
 Damaris had strong natural courage, and all the hardiness 
 of a resolute and dctiant youth ; but she felt a vague fear of 
 Nadine Napraxine, which only served to intensify the fascina- 
 tion by which she was subdued in her presence. 
 
 Her hostess still spoke kindly to her from time to time, but 
 soon ceased to think much about her : having once been 
 captured and brought thither, she had ceased to be an object 
 of great interest. 
 
 It was five o'clock ; more people had driven over from other 
 villas ; great ladies, Avith their attendant gentlemen. There 
 were the usual laughter and murmurs of conversation, and 
 general buzz of voices ; the rose-shaded lamps were shining 
 through the dayliglit ; the sounds of a grand piano magnificently 
 plpyed came from tlie music-room ; the air was full of the scent 
 of loses and gardenias, of incense and perfume. Damaris, after 
 a few glances cast at her, a few smiles caused by her, was for- 
 gotten and left to herself. Her head turned ; her breath 
 geemcd oppressed in this atmosphere so diflerent to her own ; 
 she felt lonely, ashamed, miserable ; she shrank into a corner 
 behind some jialms and gloxinias, it was the saddest fall to 
 pride and expectation. 
 
 Othinar and Bt-thune, watching her, both thought, ' She 
 has found out she is only a plaything, and she is resentful.' 
 Othmar thought, in additicm, ' If only she knew how very little 
 time she will even be as much as that !' 
 
 They saw without surprise, but with contempt, that Loswa, 
 thi'ough whose imprudence she was there, avoided her, was 
 evidently ashamed to seem acquainted with her, and devoted him- 
 self assiduously to two or three of the great ladies. Loswa wished 
 to show her that if lie had sought her forsake of his art, he had 
 better interests and occupation than a little peasant in knitted 
 stockings coidd aflbrd him. In himself he was angered against 
 her for the slightness of the impression he had made on her, 
 and the indifference witli which slie liad treated him after he 
 had honoured Jier by taking her for a model. 
 
 ' She is a little sea-mouse that came up in INIiladi's deep-
 
 or H MAR. 91 
 
 water net to-day,' he said with a shghting laugh to the great 
 ladies who asked him about lier. 
 
 Damaris overheard, and her child's heart burnt with rage 
 end scorn against them. 
 
 ' He broke bread with me yesterday, and he ridicules me to- 
 day ! ' she tliouglit, with her primitive islander's notions as to 
 the sanctity of the rites of hospitality. She hated this soft- 
 eyed, soft-voiced man, who had made an eftigy of her with liis 
 colours, and had brought to her these cruel strangers, who had 
 in a single hour made such havoc of her peace. And they hud 
 told her that she should be back at Ave Maria, and it Avas now 
 night ; deep night, she thought it ; for she did not know tliat 
 though these rooms were all lit artiticially, and the windows had 
 now been long closed, liehind these thick drapo-ries of golden 
 plush the last glow of daylight had scarcely then faded from 
 the western skies. 
 
 What would they think on the island ? — and what would 
 Catherine and Raphael do ? 
 
 No one now noticed her since they had ceased to stare at 
 her as a young barbarian ; no one now remembered her, sought 
 her, or cared for her ; she seemed likely to pass the whole 
 afternoon in a corner, undisturbed and unremembered, like a 
 little sea-mouse, as he called her, too insignificant even to ba 
 exi:)elled ! 
 
 On her island nothing could have daunted her, silenced her, 
 troubled her ; she was mistress there of the soil and of herself ; 
 she was proud and intrepid as any sovereign in her own tiny 
 kingdom ; but here all her courage deserted her ; she only 
 realised how uttei'ly she was unlike all these people around her ; 
 she was only conscious of the rude texture of her gov.'n, of the 
 rough wool of her hose, of the sea-brown on her hands and 
 arms, of the red on her cheeks blown there by the wind and 
 the weather. 
 
 All these women were delicate and pale as the waxen bells 
 of the begonia, as the creamy column of the tuberose. 
 
 She had been innocently vain, unconsciously proud of her- 
 self ; everybody had told her she was handsome, and her own 
 sense had told her that she was bjrn with finer mind and 
 liigher organisation than were possessed by those who were her 
 daily companions. And now she felt that she w^as nothing — ■ 
 nothing — only an ignorant and common peasant. She was well 
 enough at Bonaventure, but she was a poor little savage here. 
 
 Suddenly there was a general murmur of excitation and a 
 general movement of personages, and from where she had 
 been placed she saw the mistress of the house going forward 
 to greet a young man who had entered as various voices had 
 exclaimed :
 
 92 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' Prince Paul is come ! ' 
 
 They all surrounded this new-comer with murmurs of ardent 
 congratulation. He was the Rubenstein of the great world, a 
 rare and most sympathetic genius, and, ce qui ve gate Hen, he 
 was the son of a grand duke, though he lield it as a much higher 
 title that he had been also the pupil of Liszt and the beloved of 
 "Wagner. He was one of the innumerable cousins which Nadine 
 could claim here, there, and everywhere in the pages of the 
 Almanach de Gotha, and he was a person whose visits were 
 always agreeable to her. 
 
 This visit was unexpected, and was, therefore, all the more 
 welcome. In the reception of Paul of Lemberg she altogether 
 forgot her poor little bit of seaweed off Bonaventure, and every- 
 one did the same. 
 
 Othmar, coming through his rooms to welcome his new and 
 unlooked-for visitor, who was a great favourite with himself, 
 caught sight of the figure so unlike all others there, which was 
 seated forlorn and alone on a low couch, with a group of palms 
 and some draperies of Ottoman silks behind her. 
 
 ' So soon abandoned ! ' he thought with compassion. ' Poor 
 child ; she looks sadly astray. She is very handsome — as hand- 
 some as Loswa's sketch,' he thought also, with a few swift 
 glances at her. 
 
 When he too had greeted Prince Paul he turned to his wife 
 and said in an undertone : 
 
 ' Have you forgotten another guest whom you have left 
 there all alone 1 ' 
 
 She looked fatigued and annoyed at the suggestion. 
 
 ' My dear Otho, go and console her ; you were always a 
 squire of distressed damsels.' 
 
 Othmar turned away and passed back througli the apart- 
 ments to the place where he had seen Danuxris. 
 
 ' Poor little declassee ! ' lie thought i)itifully. * You have no 
 power to amuse them for more than five minvites. It was cruel 
 to bring you away from your own orange and olive shadows 
 into a world with which you have no single pulse in common !' 
 
 With his gentlest manner he addressed her :! 
 
 ' I\Iay I present myself to you, mademoiselle ? My wife, I 
 understand, persuaded you to favour us by leaving your soli- 
 tudes. I am afraid we have not much to offer you in return.' 
 
 Damaris was silent. She was grateful for the kindness, but 
 she was too offended and pained by the position in which she 
 had been placed to be easily reconciled to herself. 
 
 'You are Count Othmar?' she asked abruptly. 
 
 She was thinking of the story told her, when she was a child, 
 by Catherine. 
 
 'That is what men call me,' said he. 'Believe me, I am 
 your friend no less than my wife is so, and I am most happy
 
 GTHMAR. 93 
 
 to see you beneath my roof, I first made your acquaintanco 
 through Loswa's sketch.' 
 
 * He was not honest about that,' she said angrily. 
 
 Othmar smiled. 
 
 ' ISTo artists are honest when they are tempted by beautiful 
 subjects. He will make you the admiration of all the Paris art 
 world next year.' 
 
 She did not reply at once. Then she repeated : 
 
 ' It was not honest. 1 did not think he was going to show 
 it, and bring people to me.' 
 
 ' No ; in that 1 think he took unfair advantage of your 
 hospitality.' 
 
 ' That is what I mean. I shall not let him ever go back.' 
 
 ' Poor Loswa ! The punishment will perhaps be greater 
 than the oflence.' 
 
 .She was again silent. She knew nothing of the light give 
 and take of social intercourse. To her the things of life were 
 all very serious. ■ 
 
 He felt an extreme comj^assion for her, and with great 
 patience, kindness, and tact, strove to overcome her half-fierce 
 sliyness. He talked to her in a way which she could under- 
 stand and of things she knew ; of the life of the sea, of the 
 fruits and their seasons, of dogs and their ways, of old poets 
 and simple writers such as she loved and reverenced. Little 
 by little her suUenness gave way, her face lightened with its 
 natural smile ; she felt confidence in him and spoke to hiju with 
 that candour and directness which were as common to her as its 
 blue tint to the sea-water ; but all the while she thought with 
 sinking heart : 
 
 ' I wonder if I might ask him how late the hour is ? I wonder 
 if I might tell him how much I do want to go home ? ' 
 
 But she did not dare to do so ; she thought it would be 
 rude. 
 
 Othmar placed before her some volumes of Dore's illus- 
 trations to beguile her time, and rejoined his wife, who was 
 still occupied with the Prince of Lemberg. He was at all 
 times one of her favourites, and he had just come from Vienna, 
 and had many chroniques scandaleuses of that patrician court to 
 tell. 
 
 ' What is to be done with this unhappy child 1 ' Othmar said 
 to her somewhat sternly. ' She is miserable and dcpaysee.' 
 
 'I sent you to amuse her,' replied Nadine. 'If you did 
 not ' 
 
 'You must allow me to say,' returned Othmar, 'that it was 
 not worthy of you to bring that poor little peasant here, only 
 to neglect her and make her miserable. I should have thought 
 you were too great a lady to commit such a — will you pardon 
 me the word'/ — such a vulgarity.'
 
 94 OTHMAR 
 
 She was not as angry as he had expected ; she even smiled ; 
 but she remained as indifferent. 
 
 ' Vulgai-ity is indeed a terrible charge ! I do not think any- 
 body ever brought it against me before. I thouglit she was very 
 well entertained. I supposed Loswa took care of her. He is 
 responsible for her.' 
 
 'No,' said Othmar, 'we are responsible. She is in our 
 house, and she came here by your invitation ; on your in- 
 sistence. There is surely the law of hospitality ' 
 
 ' Among savages,' said his wife, amused. ' I believe it 
 exists somewhere still on the Red Kiver, or amongst the Red 
 Indians ; I am not sure which. We know nothing about it. 
 AVe only invite people because we think they will amuse us, 
 and we usually find that they do not. I fancied this girl would 
 be amusing, but she is not at all so here. She is dull, and she 
 is frightened.' 
 
 ' What else could you expect ? ' 
 
 ' I expected— I do not know what I expected. Genius 
 should not be abashed by mere tables and chairs.' 
 
 ' Perhaps she has no genius. Even if she have any, to be 
 stared at and laughed at by a number of strange people may be 
 sufHciently embarrassing. I confess that I think you have done 
 a ver}' cruel thing.' 
 
 She laughed. When men are angry they amuse immeasur- 
 ably a clever woman whose temper is serene. And it seemed 
 such a trifle to her. 
 
 'Pending your arrangeraeftts for her future,' said Othmar 
 after a pause of excessive irritation, ' where is she to be this 
 evening \ The second gong has sounded.' 
 
 She gave a little gestui'e of impatience. 
 
 ' How very tiresome you are ! Can she not go to the 
 servants ? ' 
 
 ' In my house ? Certainly not. I will have no guests sent 
 to the servants' hall. This young girl is as well born as any 
 other of your visitors.' 
 
 ' How odd you are ! You will make me insist on separate 
 establishments if you develop such quaint notions ! I am sure 
 she would be infinitely happier with the maids, and she would 
 run no risk of becoming dccUissec' 
 
 ' It is the only time in my life that I have foiuid your ex- 
 pressions in bad taste,' said Othmar as he turned to leave the 
 room. 
 
 She laughed : ' You had better take her into dinner your- 
 self.' 
 
 * I shall do so if she will come.' 
 
 The door closed on him, and she looked after him with a 
 frown of impatience and a smile of astonishment. 
 
 What a iuss about a little fisher-girl ! she thought. As if
 
 OTHMAR. 95 
 
 the girl could not go to the maids — go to the nurseries— go to 
 the still-room — anywhere, anywhere. What could it matter ? 
 
 She was accustomed to see her playthings no more when 
 once they had passed an idle hour for her. Why could not 
 somebody take away this one ? She would not have been here 
 had it not been for Loswa. It was all Loswa's fault, no one 
 else's. And who could tell that the girl would be such a dumb, 
 stupid, frightened creature 1 On the island she had had force 
 and courage and talkativeness enough. 
 
 Why would Otho always take everything an grand serieux ? 
 He should have lived on that island. 
 
 He was quite capable of taking her in to dinner, though 
 there were high ladies of every degree staying in the house ! 
 And she hated the idea of his making himself ridiculous. She 
 Avould override all customs and conventionalities herself when 
 she chose, but she was too thoroughly a woman of the world 
 not to regard a social solecism, a drawing-room blunder, with 
 much more horror than she would have felt for greater crimes. 
 Anything which made an absurd stoiy for society was to her 
 detestable. 
 
 ' Murder all your enemies to three generations, like a 
 Montenegrin,' she would say d propos of such matters, 'but 
 never make a fault in precedence at' your table.' 
 
 Othmar meanwhile dressed very liurriedly, and hastened to 
 the drawing-rooms before they could fill again. The latent 
 chivalry of his temper was active ; he would have been capable 
 for the moment of any eccentricity to show his honour for this 
 forlorn child. 
 
 ' What wretched artificial creatures we all are ! ' he thought. 
 ' No wonder, when any natural life comes amongst us, it feels 
 dazed and astray.' 
 
 The existence he led looked to him for the instant supremely 
 absurd. The instincts towards wider freedom and plainer 
 habits, and higher thoughts tlian those possible in his society, 
 had always been in him from his youtli, though they had found 
 no issue and no sympathy ; and in his marriage he had tightened 
 around him the bondage of the world. 
 
 The brilliant rooms were deserted when he re-entered them : 
 here and there a servant moved, attending to a lamp or carrying 
 away a stray teacup ; there was no one else. 
 
 In his gentlest tones he again addressed Damaris : 
 
 ' We are about to go to dinner,' he said to her kindly ; 
 ' will you do me the honour to accompany me ? ' 
 
 No hunted antelope could have looked mure terrified than 
 she. 
 
 ' Dinner,' she echoed. ' I dined at noon.' 
 
 ' But you can dine again ? The sea air always gives one an 
 appetite. You must not starve like this in my house.'
 
 96 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' I could not ! 1 could not ! ' she said -with tremulous lips. 
 She glanced in an agony of dread througli the rooms where all 
 those gay people were. The idea of dining with them appalled 
 her more than it would have done to tind herself on a wrecked 
 vessel, in the midst of the winds and Avaves. What would they 
 think of her ? What errors would she not make? What could 
 she know of their mannei's and fashions 1 
 
 ' I could not ! I could not ! ' she repeated, her colour 
 changing a dozen times a minute. 
 
 He endeavoured to persuade her, but found that it only 
 caused her more pain. After all, he reflected, it was natural 
 enough that she, who had never been at any table save her own, 
 should be appalled at the prospect of dining before a score of 
 fine ladies and gentlemen. 
 
 He was sorry for her. He knew the rapidity with which 
 his wdfe's caprices altered and her preferences evaporated. He 
 had seen so many please her, for an hour, to weary her im- 
 measurably whenever they afterwards presumed to recall to her 
 the fact of their existence. 
 
 ' Well, you shall do as you please in this house,' he said to 
 her. ' Remain here, and I will tell them to bring your dinner 
 to you.' 
 
 ' Indeed— indeed I "want nothing,' she protested ; * I could 
 not eat.' 
 
 She was about to say to him much more than that ; to say 
 that the sun had set, the night had come, the hours were passing 
 fast — but she could not tind courage. After all, what was she 1 
 — a stupid, ignorant little sea-born savage in the eyes of all 
 these peopjle. 
 
 She remained where she was, silent, and miserable, yet 
 watching with curious eyes the pageant so new to her of the 
 lighted salons, the lovely ladies, the pretty pi'ocession that 
 passed out of the drawing-rooms as they went to dinner. Could 
 these be human beings who lived always like this? She 
 wondered — she envied — and yet she longed for her own free 
 life on the waves, \mder the olives, climbing with the goats, 
 diving with the gannets, rocking in the orange-boughs with the 
 thrush and the greenfinch. It was beautiful here, magical, 
 marvellous, incredible ; yet she wanted fresh air, she wanted 
 free movement ; like a mountain-bom rose shiit up in a hot- 
 house, she felt suffocated in this sultry and perfumed air. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 A.s Othmar had promised, a servant brought to her, served on 
 silver and Japanese porcelain with damask, which she took to
 
 OTHMAR. 97 
 
 be sntin, a repast of which the dishes succeeded each other in 
 bewildering rapidity, and looked so ethereal and pretty that it 
 seemed to her quite grievous to break them up and eat them. 
 The fairies themselves might have feasted oil" these tempting 
 viands, and her appetite, which was the robust one of youth, 
 proved to her that it is possible to dine at noon and yet be 
 ready to dine again at eight. She had satisfied her hunger, 
 however, long before the full complement of the services had 
 been brought to her, and the fruit and bonbons best pleased 
 her childish tastes. She gained courage to leave her corner and 
 come from beyond the palms and move timidly about the rooms, 
 looking now at this picture, now at that statue, and ever con- 
 fronted by her own likeness in the mirrors, and beholding it 
 with impatience. She touched the flowers embroidered on the 
 plush of the chairs, astonished that the blossoms were not real. 
 She looked with wonder at the grand piano, marvelling that out 
 of its painted panels and ivory keyboard such melodies as she had 
 heard could have been drawn. She gazed at the figures on the 
 Gobelin tapestries in entranced delight, and, with the unerring 
 selection of a nature instinctively artistic, paused enraptured 
 before the marble copy by Clesinger of the Yatican Hermes. 
 
 She who had never seen anything but Bonaventure and 
 the fisher-people's cabins on the mainland, and the little dusky 
 shops where the fruit was sold, was dazzled by the beauty of 
 St. Pharamond within and without. Everything aK)und her 
 was strange and wonderful ; the very flowers were unfamiliar ; 
 gorgeous blossoms to which she could give no names. 
 
 But when she caught sight of her own figure in the mirrors, 
 standing amidst all the glow and delicacy of ct)lour of these 
 marvellous chambers, she seemed to herself barbarous, incon- 
 gruous, grotesque, a blot upon the scene, a savage set amidst 
 civilisation. All the flatteries which had been poured out to her 
 ear had passed by her, making little impression. There were 
 the mirrors, which were truer counsellors than he ; they showed 
 her that she was not as these people were. She did not think she 
 had any beauty at all, she only saw that she had none of this 
 grace which was around her, that she was like a bit of ribbon 
 weed from the sea amongst lilies and lilac. 
 
 She was so interested and so absorbed that she was startled 
 as by a blow when she saw the double doors at the end of the 
 drawing-rooms thrown open by a man with a silver chain and a 
 white wand, and the figure of her hostess appeared led by the 
 Prince of Lemberg and followed by all the ladies and gentlemen 
 who had dined with her that evening. 
 
 With the swift movement of a hunted thing Damaris drew 
 back behind a screen of plush embroidered like the walls and 
 chairs and couches with silken garlands of spring flowers. 
 
 No one was thinking of her. 
 
 H
 
 98 OTHMAR. 
 
 Even Otlimar passed by the spot where he had left her with- 
 out looking for her. He was talking to a very tall slight blonde 
 woman, who was the Princesse de Laon, and had been Blanchette 
 de Vannes. They all went by the screen and passed on into the 
 farthest room of all, where the Erard stood. Damaris, like a 
 forsaken child, crouched down on the stool she had found there, 
 and the big hot tears forced themselves from under her eyelids. 
 It Avas foolish, she knew ; unreasonable, no doubt ; but the 
 most piteous sense of mortification and of insignificance was 
 upon her, like a heavy hand crushing her down into the earth. 
 
 At Bonaventure, despite the harshness at any disobedience 
 with which she was treated by her grandfather, she had been in 
 much a spoilt child ; the few people on the island were all her 
 ministers and servants. On the rare occasions when she visited 
 the mainland, everyone treated with reverence and flattery the 
 heiress to Jean Berarde's wealth and acres ; even when these 
 great people had come to her they had praised her talent, they had 
 suggested wild hopes to her, they had given her honeyed words ; 
 unconsciously she had expected something very great to happen 
 to her when she should be seen at this house Avhere her presence 
 was said to be so desired — to realise that she was nothing here, 
 less than the servants, who at least had their place and their 
 duties in it, was the most cruel of disillusions. 
 
 Ovei'come by the unusual Avarmth and closeness of the 
 atmosphere, which sent her blood to her temples and filled her 
 with a strange drowsiness, she let her head fall back upon the 
 cushion of her couch and fell asleep. She dreamed strange 
 things. There was nothing to distract her. The servants 
 glanced at her contemptuously and let her alone ; they had no 
 orders about her, and in the house of Nadine no one ever dared 
 to act without orders. 
 
 The perfumed air, the dry warmth from the calorifhcs, the 
 profound stillness, invited slumber ; and she slept on as soundly 
 as any tired child that throws itself upon a primrose bank on an 
 April day. 
 
 She was roused by a sound of sweet notes like the voices of 
 her nightingales when they sung under the orange-leaves. 
 
 In the farthest room of all, where tlie pianoforte stood, Paul 
 of Lemberg had begun to play ; melodies of Tristan and Isolde 
 thrilled tlirough the silence to her ear and awakened her in her 
 hiding-place. She who had never heard any such niusic in her 
 life listened with a surprised sense of delight so intense that it 
 was also pain. The delicate rain c)f liarmnnious notes falling one 
 on another, the strange mystery with which the chords of the 
 instrument repeat and concentrate all tlie sighs of passion and 
 the woes of feeling, all the inexplicable and marvellous humanity 
 and sympathy with which all perfect music is filled, were heard 
 by her for tlie fii-st time in their most exquisite forms. She
 
 OTHMAR. 99 
 
 listened entranced, awed, and penetrated with an ecstasy which 
 "vvas as sharp as sutfering. She forgot where slie Avas. When 
 silence followed she was w^eeping bitterly ; all tlie wounds of her 
 heart at once deepened a thousandfold, yet healed by a touch- 
 divine. 
 
 All the longing, all the dreams, all the vague desires and un- 
 satisfied fancies which had been in her mind and heart unt(jld 
 to anyone, and misunderstood even by herself, burned to obtain 
 utterance in this the first music she had ever heard. She 
 crouched in her corner unseen ; a servant, who had i)laced a 
 hunp behind the screen, had been too discreet in his ofHcc, nnd 
 too contemptuous of herself, to disturb her. She sat still on her 
 low stool, and listened as the harmonies succeeded each other 
 from the distance. 
 
 Paul of Lemberg was in the mood to recall a thousand 
 memories and invent a thousand fancies in music, and his com- 
 panions were capable of giving him that comprehension and 
 a])preciation Avhich the finest scientific knowledge of the tonic art 
 alone can render. 
 
 In the pauses which at times ensued, the conversation was 
 animated and absorbing ; they spoke of music, always of music, 
 and Othmar, whose greatest interest had always been found in 
 music, forgot a.s well as others the guest whom his house 
 sheltered. 
 
 When at length Lemberg rose and drank a cup of coffee, and 
 lit a cigarette, and proceeded to faire lacoiir to the Princesse do 
 Laon, and four violins in a quatuor of well-known artists were 
 tuning to fill up the blank of silence he had left, Othmar, witlia 
 pang of compunction, recalled the hours during which the child 
 had been neither seen nor sought by any one of them. It had 
 been half-past eight when they had gone into dinner ; it was 
 now past eleven o'cloclc. 
 
 He w^ent through his drawing-rooms hastily, looking for her 
 in every place, and failing to find her. At length, when he Avas 
 about to inquire for her of his household, he saw a shadow 
 behind the embroidered screen, and moving the screen aside, 
 discovered her in her solitude. 
 
 'My dear child ! ' he exclaimed, ashamed at his own neglect 
 of her, ' where have you been I I have not seen you for hours. 
 What a dull evening you have passed ! ' 
 
 The tears were dry on her cheeks, but they had left her eyes 
 humid and heavy ; her face had grown very pale. 
 
 'I have heard all tliat,' she said with a little gesture towartls 
 the distant music-room. ' I did not think there was anything as 
 beautiful in the world.' 
 
 ' line sensitive ! ' thought Othmar, recalling his wife's half- 
 unkind and half-compassionate expression as he answered. His 
 knowledge of such sensitive natures induced him now to observe 
 
 h2
 
 loo OTHMAR. 
 
 with an instinct of pity the trouble visible on the young girl's 
 face. She had an isolated, pathetic, bewiklered look which 
 touched him, and with it there was an expression of anger and 
 hurt pride. No child lost at dark in a wood where it had 
 strayed through disobedience, was ever more beM-ildered, lonely, 
 or punished for its sin, than she was in those radiant drawing- 
 rooms, surrounded with the light laughter and the, to her, un- 
 intelligible chatter in which she liad no share ; oppressed by this 
 overheated, over-perfumed air in wliich she felt stifled and sick, 
 abashed, and yet angered by the neglect and obscurity to which 
 they liad abandoned her. 
 
 ' I fear you want to go home, my dear,' he said compassion- 
 ately. ' Is it not so ? ' 
 
 She hesitated, then answered curtly : 'Yes.' 
 ' How long have you been asked, or have you promised, to 
 stay with us ? ' 
 
 ' She said 1 should go back by sunset.' 
 ' My wife said so ? ' 
 
 ' Yes.' She paused, then added with a tremor of terror in 
 her voice, ' If I be out when he comes home my grandfather will 
 kill me.' 
 
 ' But he will know you have been safe here with us ?' 
 She shook her head. ' That will make no dilTerence, 
 Monsieur. You do not know him. Of course it is all my fault ; 
 
 I did wickedly ' 
 
 ' You did, as I understand it, a natural childlike piece of 
 disobedience ; you ought not certainly to have been tempted by 
 others to do it, but as" your grandsire will learn whom you have 
 been with, I cannot see that he can be so very greatly angered, 
 even if you should stay here all night.' 
 ' You do not know him,' said Damaris. 
 
 She was nervous and pale ; her hands played restlessly with 
 the pearls at her throat ; her beautiful eyebrows were drawn 
 together in anger and distress. She did not say so, but more 
 than once her shoulders had felt the stroke of Jean Berarde's 
 heavy cudgel. 
 
 'He must know our name very well,' added Othmar. 'It 
 will surely be voucher enough to liim that you have passed your 
 
 time in safe keeping ? ' 
 
 ' You are " aristos." He hates you.' 
 
 He smiled ; he had seen many of tlicse red Republicans who 
 hated him furiously in tlieory, yet were never averse to wor- 
 shipping the golden calf of the INIaison d'Othmar. 
 
 ' Seriously,' he said, ' do you think that you will be punished 
 cruelly if you should be here all night? Are you sure that your 
 grandfather will not be open to reason ? ' 
 
 ' You do not know him, or you would not ask.' 
 
 ' No ; I do not knoAv him, and so I have no right to form
 
 OTHMAR. loi 
 
 any opinion. But I see that what you do know of him makes 
 you miserable at the idea of his anger. Well, then, home you 
 must go in some manner. Our promise to you must in some 
 way or other be kept. Wait a moment here, and I will return 
 to you.' 
 
 Damaris looked after him with interest and gratitude. 
 Young though she had been when the death of Yseulte had 
 moved the hearts of the whole people on those shores, some- 
 thing of its sadness and of its tragedy had reached her, and still 
 remained in memory with her like the echo of some melancholy 
 sonc heard at evening in the shade of the olive-woods. Thev 
 had been mere names to her, but they had been names of pathos 
 and of meaning, like the names of Athalie, of Ondiue, of 
 Calypso, and of Helen — names attached to a story, leaving a 
 recollection, suggesting something outside common life and 
 ordinary fate. 
 
 'I suppose he has forgotten her long ago,' she thought as she 
 looked at him as he passed through the salons. 
 
 Othmar approached his wife, and waited impatiently until 
 there was a pause in the conversation buzzing around her. 
 Then he bent towards her : 
 
 ' Nadege, did you really promise this child from Bonaventure 
 that she should go home at sunset ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, I think I did. What of it 1 ' 
 
 ' Only that I thought you always kept your word, and I Had 
 you have not done so. ' 
 
 There was that in his tone which irritated her extremelj^ ; 
 she thought he spoke to her as if she were a person at fault 
 whom he reproved. Those nearest her could hear every word 
 he uttered. She turned away from him with her coldest 
 manner : 
 
 ' Tell the girl that she may sleep here ; the women will see 
 to it. She can say that she has my commands.' 
 
 Othmar did not reply ; he moved aside and let her pass on 
 to the room where they were playing baccarat. Had they been 
 alone he would have said what he thought ; as it was, he went 
 out of his drawing-rooms and across the gardens to the boat- 
 house on the quay. 
 
 The yacht could find no anchorage there, and was gone to 
 Villefranche. No sailors remained there in the night-time ; 
 even the keeper of the boats did not sleep there. All the pretty 
 painted toys were locked up in the boathouse, and the keeper 
 had the keys, he could not even get at one of them. 
 
 ' This is the use of being master of the place ! ' he said to 
 himself with natural irritation. It had never chanced before at 
 St. Pharamond that anyone had ever wanted to go on the sea 
 after twilight. 
 
 He retraced his steps to the house and called two of his
 
 I02 OTHMAR. 
 
 servants, and gave tlicm orders to break open the door of the 
 boathouse and take out the Una boat as the lightest and 
 swiftest. 
 
 Then he returned to where Damaris awaited him, 
 
 'You are not afraid to go on the sea in an open boat?' he 
 asked lier. ' The water is like glass, and there is a full moon.' 
 
 ' Afraid— on the sea ! ' 
 
 She could have laughed at the idea ; the sea was her com- 
 rade and playfellow, and had never harn\ed her. She was no 
 more afraid of its storms than of Clovis's teeth. 
 
 'Then you shall go home,' he said brietiy. 'Come with 
 me.' 
 
 ' I can go home ?' she exclaimed in ecstasy. 
 
 ' Yes, if you are not afraid of an open boat ; there are no 
 other means. ' 
 
 ' Oh, I can sail it myself ! I steer with my foot, and sail 
 very well.' 
 
 ' You shall not go wholly alone,' said Othniar with a smile. 
 ' I regret that to speed the parting guest is the only form of 
 old-fashioned hospitality wliich it is possible for me to show 
 you.' 
 
 Damaris hesitated a moment. 
 
 ' Must I not say farewell to Madame ? ' 
 
 ' Madame is occupied,' he said as curtly. ' Come, my dear. 
 Unless you are sure you would not sooner stop here and return 
 in the morning % ' he added. ' jMy wife bade me say she would 
 be happy if you would so decide.' 
 
 ' (3]i no ! ' said Damaris, with terror in her eyes. ' I could 
 not, I dare not ! ]\Iy grandfather may be home at sunrise.' 
 
 'Come, then,' said Othmar. 
 
 She needed no second bidding, but willingly followed him 
 through the gardens to the landing-place of the little harbour. 
 The moon was brilliant ; the cedars and other evergreen trees 
 spread their boughs over the marble balustrades ; the aloes and 
 cacti raised their broad spears and showed their fantastic shapes 
 in the clear white light ; there was a marble copy of the Faun 
 which laughed at the stars ; the waves were gently rippling over 
 the last stair, the sea spread smooth as a lake as far as the eye 
 could reach ; the lights of Villefranche glittered in the darkness 
 in the curve of tlie shore ; tlic air was fragrant with tlie scent of 
 millions of violets and of the tall bay thickets under which they 
 bloomed. 
 
 Othmar paused involuntarily. 
 
 ' How seldom wo look at the night ! ' he said with an \nicon- 
 Boious sigh. 
 
 ' It is so beautiful hero ! ' she said with a sigh which echoed 
 his, but had a very difTercnt emotion for its source as she looked 
 with timidity at the marble Faun. She had never seen a statue
 
 OTHMAR. 103 
 
 before ; she was not sure what its meaning was, but the sweet 
 laughing face whose lij^s seemed to move in the moonlight be- 
 witched her. ■ 
 
 ' It is as beautiful on your island, no doubt,' he answered, 
 'and far more natural. This place is almost wholly conven- 
 tional.' 
 
 The word said nothing to her ; she had never heard it before. 
 She was gazing at the marble statue. 
 
 ' What does that mean ? ' she said with hesitation. 
 
 'It means youth — the treasure you have,' said Othmar. 
 ' Do not want any other. They have tried to teach you discon- 
 tent. They have been very wrong. You have not been happy 
 here. ' 
 
 'No — not quite,' she said, afraid to seem ungrateful, yet 
 obliged to tell the truth. 
 
 ' No ; you have felt remorse ; you have been wounded by 
 neglect ; and you have been allured by the artiticial and the 
 insincere. Take warning : the world would give you just what 
 this house has given you.' 
 
 The Una boat was at the foot of the stairs ; its little sail was 
 spread, there were cushions and shawls inside it ; the men of 
 tlie household whom Othmar had summoned had made every- 
 thing ready, and waited there. 
 
 ' Tell your lady,' he continued to his men, ' that I am gone 
 on the sea ; shall be back probably before dawn.' 
 
 Then he waved them aside and launched his boat into deep 
 water. 
 
 Othmar gave his hand to Damaris ; she touched it, but 
 vaulted into the boat without his aid. When she saw that he 
 followed her she grew scarlet, and her large eyes opened with 
 that look of amaze which so well became lier. 
 
 ' You — you ' she stammered, and could utter no other 
 
 word. 
 
 ' Certainly,' said Othmar. ' Since you have been deceived 
 into coming to my house, I will at least see you safely back to 
 your own.' 
 
 She was still so astonished that she could form no protest 
 and shape no thanks. 
 
 ' You must steer,' he said to Damaris as he handled the sail. 
 
 She still said nothing, but she took the tiller-ropes. The 
 little vessel glided easily through the peaceful waves ; the wind, 
 by a favouring chance, blew lightly from the north-west ; it 
 plunged with the grace and swiftness of a gannet into the silvery 
 moonlight and the phosphorescent water. 
 
 Othmar gave his companion a little gold compass set at the 
 back of a watch. 
 
 ' You must guide our course,' he said to her. ' Bonaventure 
 is as imknown to me as Japan to Marco Polo
 
 I04 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' I shall make no mistake,' she said, finding her voice for the 
 first time since she had seen him enter the boat. ' I have 
 steered on Sundays from Villefranche home. But — but — I 
 cannot bear to trouble you ; it is not right.' 
 
 ' You give me a charming moonlight sail,' said Othmar ; 
 *and you will show me a terra incogiiita. I am immeasurably 
 your debtor. But for you I should still be indoors in warm 
 rooms with artificial light and an artificial laughter round me. 
 One can have enough of that any evening.' 
 
 ' If 1 did not like it I would not have any of it,' said Damaris, 
 witli her natural manner returning to her. 
 
 ' I am not sure that I do not like it,' said Othmar ; ' and, at 
 all events, the person I most wish to please likes it. That must 
 be sufficient for me.' 
 
 Damaris looked at him ; she did not say anything. She was 
 thinking of that day when she had gathered the daflbdils, and 
 the swallows had flown about her head, and the old woman 
 Catherine had said : ' Holy Virgin, to think she was so un- 
 happy ! ' Were they all unhappy, these great people, al- 
 though they had everything on earth that they could want or 
 wish I 
 
 Life outside the island seemed to be a terrible per- 
 plexity. 
 
 ' Mind how you steer,' said Othmar, as in the multiplicity 
 and gravity of her thoughts tliey drifted perilously near the 
 troubled water churning in the wake of a steam yacht. With 
 prompt dexterity and coolness she corrected her oversight in 
 time. 
 
 ' There are few things more delightful than being at sea at 
 night when the moon is bright, and the vessel is small enougli 
 to make one very near the water,' he said, as they pursued 
 their course and he aided the passage of the boat with the oars. 
 'Just like this, between the sea and sky, with all those stars 
 above, and all 'the silent night around one — one ought to be a 
 poet to be worthy to enjoy it, or able to put the charm of it 
 into fitting words.' 
 
 'Yes.'' 
 
 She had felt herself what he said so often, and she too liad 
 never been able to find speech for that deep delight, that name- 
 less melancholy, which came to her witli the solitude of the sea 
 at night. 
 
 He looked at her as she sat at the tiller with the moonlight 
 falling full upon her face, and making it older and more spiritual 
 than it liad been by day. So she would look when years had 
 saddened licr, chastened her, etherealised her, taken from her 
 the boylike buoyancy of her spirit, the frank audacity of her 
 childhood. Or rather, no ; — she would not look like that, she 
 would have wedded Groa Louis, have had sturdy, healthy,
 
 OTHMAR. 105 
 
 riotous cliildren plucking at her skirts ; have grown heavier, 
 stouter, coarser, duller ; have ceased to care about the moon- 
 light on the sea ; have heeded only the sea's harvest of tunny, 
 crawfish, cod, and haddock. Poor Galatea, whom the Poly- 
 phemus of a common marriage would bind upon her rock with 
 all the greedy waves of common cares leaping at her and licking 
 her with unkind tongues ! Yet there was no fate better for 
 Galatea than her rock ; he was persuaded of it j he wished her 
 to be so persuaded. 
 
 CHAPTEPv, XIII. 
 
 As the boat went smoothly and fleetly over the calm water, 
 through the silvery night, beneath the immense vault of the 
 starry heavens, he talked to her with kindly gentleness, and 
 heard from her all there was to hear of her short life and of her 
 great love for Bonaventure. 
 
 The course they took was almost wholly free of vessels ; 
 some heavy brig, fish or fruit laden, ahme crossed their path, 
 and the great green or red lights of the steamships were always 
 afaroif. The navigation of their little vessel did not so engross 
 either of them that they had not leisure to converse, and 
 Damaris, in the dusk of the night, in the familiar sea breeze 
 and sea scent, in the motion of the boat which was as welcome 
 and sootliing to her as the rocking of its nurse's arms to a child, 
 felt an exhilaration which restored her spirits and loosened her 
 power of speech. She ceased to be afraid of the chastisement 
 she would receive at Bonaventure, and she felt a confidence in 
 the kindness and the protection of her companion which was 
 very ditt'erent to the flattered vanity and fascinated awe which 
 his wife had aroused in her. 
 
 That he was a grand seigneur did not affect her with any 
 sense of diffidence, both because the granddaughter of Jean 
 Berarde had been reared in an utter iudiflerence to such divi- 
 sions of rank, and also because in her own heart she fondly 
 nourished the legend of her own pure descent. The sea lords 
 of the mountain above San Ilemo were as true and near to her 
 in her belief as Hugh Lupus to the Grosvenors, as Hugues 
 Capet to Don Carlos. 
 
 It had been eleven o'clock when they had left the quay of 
 St. Pharamond. It was dawn when they came in sight of the 
 island ; its grey olive-crowned side fused softly with the silvery 
 dusk which preceded the sunrise. There was no sail in sight, 
 except in the offing to the eastward sfime score of barques look- 
 ing no larger than a flock of sea-swallows; they were those of a 
 coral tieet.
 
 io6 OTHMAR. 
 
 * Is that your little kingdom?' asked Othmar, looking towards 
 the cloudlike isle which seemed to float between the sea and 
 sky. ' Well, it must be a charming life all alone there amidst 
 the waters, tar away from the world and all its fret and fume. 
 You must be happy there % ' 
 
 ' Oh yes,' she answered rather doubtfully, without the 
 spontaneous whole-heartedness which had characterised her 
 replies to Loswa. ' But, you see— there is a good deal of the 
 fret and the fume — becauae we trade with the mainland, and 
 when prices are bad my grandfather is out of temper. It is 
 not like Fenelon's island at all.' 
 
 ' Even if not, be sure it is happier to be on it than amidst 
 the world,' said Othmar, anxious to undo what his wife and her 
 friends had done. ' The pastoral life is the best there is, and 
 when it is joined to the liberty of a seafaring life, it seems to 
 me to be perfect. 
 
 ' I believe, at least I know,' he continued with some hesita- 
 tion, ' that my wife spoke to you of your talents, and of all they 
 might do for you in that bigger Avorld which is to you only 
 " the mainland." Perhaps they might do much, perhaps they 
 might do nothing ; that world is very capricious, and its rewards 
 arcTnot always just. Poets are charming companions, but they 
 are not infallible guides. Fate has given you a safe home, a 
 tranquil lot, a sure provision. Do not tempt fortune to desert 
 you by showing it any ingratitude. I fear my words seem veiy 
 cold and dull ones after the gorgeous flatteries you have heard, 
 but they at least are wise as 1 see wisdom for you ; and, believe 
 me, they are well meant. ' 
 
 He spoke with earnestness as the boat approached the island, 
 and, with the sail lowered, drifted lightly before the wind to- 
 wards the beach. 
 
 ' Will you tell your grandfather ? ' asked Othmar, as they 
 neared the isle. 
 
 ' Do you think that I ought ? ' she said in a very low voice, 
 in which was an unspoken supplication. 
 
 ' I tliink you ought,' he answered. ' Do not begin your life 
 with a secret.' 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 ' Surely,' he continued, 'he will not be very angry when he 
 knows that you were so much pressed by the Countess Othmar, 
 and that I have myself brought you home. He will be sure you 
 have been as safe as with himself. I will come and see you 
 again some day.' 
 
 The face of Damaris clouded. She was silent, occupying 
 herself with guiding the vessel through the surf which broke on 
 the broad shell beach of IJonaventure. 
 
 The mists were white and soft, the liead of the cliffs was 
 invisible in the tender silvery fog ; she could hear the voiceg
 
 OTHMAR. 107 
 
 above her of Clovis and Bi'imeliildt. The boat was run ashore, 
 and she leaped out before Othmar couhl aid lier. 
 
 'You are vexed with me,' he said with a smile. 'But, 
 indeed, my dear, it would be a life-long regret to me if, through 
 any suggestion or persuasion of my wife's, you were broug-lit 
 into a life wliich failed to answer your ideal of it, and rendered 
 you unfitted to return to the simplicity and quiet of this happy 
 little place. There are neither knights nor lions nowadays for 
 Una. She must defend herself in a bitter warfare in whicli lier 
 sex is only a weapon against her, while her enemies are without 
 scruple. Adieu, you will prefer to go uj) alone.' 
 
 iShe turned quickly, and looked up at him with a contrite, 
 timid little smile. 
 
 ' I have no doubt you are right, only — one dreams things 
 — sometimes. I ought to thank you so much : you have been 
 very good to me.' 
 
 ' Not at all. I have had a charming night upon the sea, 
 and am your debtor.' 
 
 Tlien he begged her to keep the little gold compass in memory 
 of tliat evening, raised his hat, and left her. 
 
 ' Can you manage the boat alone ? ' she cried to him in 
 anxiety. 
 
 ' Quite well,' said Othmar, as he pushed it through the surf. 
 
 When he was some roods from the shore he looked back ; 
 he saw the figure of Damaris still standing where he had left 
 her, tlie silvery green mass of tlie olive-clothed cliffs rising 
 behind lier till they were lost in the hovering clouds of mist. 
 The barking of the dogs came faintly over the sea, and a bell 
 tolled from above the daybreak call to work. 
 
 ' I have done wliat I can,' thought Othmar, ' but the poison 
 is there. No antidote, even if it succeed, can ever make the 
 blood quite what it was before the virus entered. And what 
 are ambition and discontent but as the bite of a snake when they 
 seize on a woman— a child % ' 
 
 Tlien he went back over the calm blue water, while with 
 ever}' moment the wliite light in the east spread further, ar.d 
 the mists lifted and the winds dropped, and soon in all its glory 
 rose the sun. 
 
 To this man, whose youth had been full of high ideals, 
 which his manhood had found it utterly impossible for him to 
 fulfil, tliere was something wliich touched him profoundly in all 
 youth which, as once liis own had done, looked forward to tlie 
 world as to some field of combat, where the fair flowers of faith 
 and of justice would possess a magical strength like the lilies 
 and roses wherewith the nymphs smote Rinaldo. 
 
 To the eyes of men, Otlnnar appeax-ed the most enviable of 
 all persons ; to the society around him, as to the multitudes to 
 whom he was but one of the great names which govern the
 
 ro8 OTHMAR. 
 
 destinies of nations, it seemed that few living beings had ever 
 enjoyed so complete a happiness and prosperity as did he. But 
 in the bottom of his own heart there was a latent bitterness, 
 which was disappointment. He could not have said where or 
 how precisely this sense of faihire came to him, in the midst of 
 wliat was absolute success and entire fruition of all his wishes. 
 Yet it was there. It is the accompaniment of all power and of 
 all possession. Contentment looks from a narrow lattice on a 
 tiny garden bounded by a high box hedge. Culture has the 
 vast horizon of the universe and finds it small, it can measure 
 the stars, and sighs to wander beyond their spheres. Dissatis- 
 faction is the shadow which goes with all light of the intel- 
 ligence. The uncultured mind cr.n be content ; the cultured, 
 never. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 Damahis went slowly from the clifis through the moonlight ; 
 her heart was heavy. She had had a great temptation, a great 
 joy, a great disillusion, and a great grief, each following close 
 on the heels of the other in the short space of a few hours. 
 
 She came back to her poor little isle with something of tliat 
 remorse, that dejection, that sense of all the golden fruits being 
 but ashes at the core, with which the great ones of earth, after 
 reaching the highest heights of power or of fame, will come 
 back to their lowly village birthjtlace and think with a sigh, 
 ' Could I but be as once I was ! ' 
 
 The night seemed far severed from the day which had 
 heralded it as if by long years : never more could she rise in the 
 daybreak quite the same child who had leaped to the lattice, 
 and laughed at the sunrise on the sea, that morning. 
 
 She did not reason on the change in her, nor understand it, 
 but she felt it. 
 
 When the little velvet hided calf has been branded in the 
 stock-yard witli the cruel iron, never more (though turned loose 
 again) will it frolic the same in the prairie grass unwitting uf 
 l)ain or ill. 
 
 She took her way slowly over the head of the clilf across tho 
 breadth of pasture where a few days before she had led Loswa. 
 There was a dusky crouching figure waiting in the sliadow of 
 the orange-boughs ; it was that of old Catlierine tlie servant, 
 •who sprang towards her and gripped her arm with both hands. 
 
 ' JJe is come liomc ! ' she said in a loud, terrified whisper. 
 
 * My grandfather ! ' 
 
 Bold though she was by nature, iier lips and cliceks grow 
 cold and her heart stood still.
 
 OTHMAR. 109 
 
 'Who else !' cried the old woman roughly. 'For wlio else 
 would I keep out of my bed at such an hour to watch for you? 
 Where have you been all the while ? ' 
 
 ' I have been with the lady.' 
 
 Her voice sounded very dull and hopeless ; it melted the 
 heart of the j^easant who loved her. 
 
 ' Well, well, you have had your will and your vanitv', and 
 have paid for them both ! ' she said, less harshly. ' Poor little 
 fool ! It is your mother's light blood working in you, I sup- 
 pose ; you're not to blame. They are to blame who bred you. 
 I have watched for you ever since I gave him his supper. He 
 asked where you were. I said you were asleep. He lias had a 
 good deal of brandy. If you get in by the scullery door, and 
 take your shoes oft', and go softly up the stairs, he will not hear, 
 and nobody knows you have been away save Raphael and my- 
 self. That is why I waited outside, to stop and tell you that 
 you might creep in unseen.' 
 
 Damaris stooped her tall head and kissed the woman's 
 withered cheek : 
 
 'That was like you, dear Catherine ! ' 
 
 'More fool I, perhaps. I will punish you come morning, 
 never fear. But I should be loath for you to see Berarde 
 to-night. Get in.' 
 
 Seeing that Damaris did not move, she pushed her by the 
 shoulder. 
 
 But the words which Othmar had spoken were echoing 
 in the ear, and sounding at the conscience, of the girl, bear- 
 ing a harvest which he had never dreamed of when he had 
 uttered them. There was tJiat in them which had aroused 
 all the courage and exaggerated sentiment of her mind and 
 character. 
 
 The instincts of heroism, always strong in her, and that 
 instinct to martyrdom ever dear to anything of womanhood, 
 rose in her with irresistible force. 
 
 ' If Count Othmar ever heard that I did not tell, he Vv^ould 
 think it so mean and so false,' she pondered, while the eager 
 grip of the woman's fingers closed on her and tried to pull her 
 to the open side-entrance of the house. 
 
 She resisted. 
 
 'No, no ; not so, not so ; not in secret,' she muttered. ' I 
 wish to see my grandfather. Let me pass.' 
 
 ' Are you mad ] ' screamed Catherine, dragging her backward 
 by her skirts. ' He is hot with brandy, I tell you ; you know 
 what brandy makes him ; if he knows you have been off" the 
 island he will beat you. Has he not beaten you before, that 
 you should doubt it 1 ' 
 
 • I do not doubt,' yaid Damaris. 'But it is only just that ha 
 should be told
 
 no OTHMAR. 
 
 'I owe him everything, you know,' she added, 'and I did 
 wrong to go away from home in liis absence.' 
 
 'Wrong! of course you did wrong. But you would listen 
 to nobody, you were so taken up with those fine folks. Of 
 course you did wrong, but since the harm is done, and it is of 
 no use to cry over spilt milk and broken eggs, get you into your 
 bed ; your grandfather will never know anything. Rapliael and 
 I, be sure, shall not tell. Get in and hold your own counsel. 
 In the morning it will all be as one.' 
 
 ' No, it would not be fair,' said Damaris. 
 
 Her face was very pale, but the exaltation of a romantic 
 devotion to honour had come upon her, and gave her a strength 
 not her own. She passed the figure of Catlicrine in the entrance 
 of the scullery, and walked with firm steps through the stone 
 passages, between the crowded bales of oranges and lemons, 
 straightway into the great kitchen, where Jean Berarde sat. 
 The liglit from an oil lamp which swung from the rafters shone 
 on his strong, harsh, brown features, his grizzled eyebrows, his 
 white beard ; the broad-leaved hat he had drawn over his face 
 threAv a dark gloom over the upper part of his features, and 
 added to the natural hardness and fierceness of their expres- 
 sion. He had been running smuggled brandies successfully in 
 his brig, a sport very dear to him, thougli prudence made him 
 but seldom indulge in it ; he had been drinking a good deal, 
 and though not wholly drunk his temper was in readiness for 
 any outbreak, like flax soaked in petroleum. He looked up 
 from under his heavy brows at Damaris as she entered ; the 
 light and shadows were wavering before his sight, but he re- 
 cognised her. 
 
 ' The woman said you were a-Led,' he muttered with a great 
 oath. ' What do you mean — up at this time of night 1 ' 
 
 The exaggerated scruples and the overwrought exaltation of 
 the child made her brave to answer him. She came up quite 
 close to him and looked at him with shining, steady eyes : 
 
 'I am only now come home,' slie said in a low voice. 'I 
 have done wrong ; I have been out all day.' 
 
 Jean Berarde rose to his feet unsteadily, and towered above 
 her, a rude, savage, terrible figure ; his brcatli, hot as the fumes 
 of burning spirit, scorched her cheek. 
 
 ' Out ! ' he echoed. ' Out ? — witliout my leave ? Out where 1 ' 
 
 She looked at him without ilinching. Only she was very 
 pale. 
 
 ' They came and asked me — the ladies and gentlemen— and 
 1 wished so much to go. I have never seen at all how those 
 jjeople live, and when I got there the hours went on, and T 
 could not get back until he, Count Othinar, was kind enough 
 to bring me home in his own boat, and he rowed himself all the 
 way ; and he said tliat it would not be right for me to hide
 
 OTHMAR. in 
 
 such a thing from you, because, though I have done no harm, 
 yet I have disobeyed you ' 
 
 She paused, having made her confession ; she breathed very 
 quickly and faintly ; her eyes looked up at him with an un- 
 spoken prayer for pardon. 
 
 In answer, he lifted his arm and struck her to the ground. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 OrHMAR did not see his wife on the following day until the 
 one o'clock breakfast, and then saw her surrounded with her 
 friends. 
 
 When everyone had gone to their rooms after midnight he 
 ventured to visit her in her own apartments. Her women were 
 there ; she did not as usual dismiss them ; she looked at him 
 Avith something of that expression which used to chill the soul 
 of Platon Napraxine. 
 
 ' My dear friend,' she said coldly as he greeted her, ' do not 
 speak to me again as you spoke yesterdixy evening. It is not 
 what I like.' 
 
 ' 1 regret it if I spoke improperly,' replied Othmar. ' I was 
 not conscious that I did. You had made a promise, and I re- 
 minded you of it. I was not aware there was any grave offence 
 in that.' 
 
 ' Ce.&i le ton qui fait la musique. Your tone was offensive. 
 Y'"ou may remember that I do not care to be reminded of any- 
 thing when I forget it.' 
 
 ' There is noticing praiseworthy in your sentiment,' said her 
 husband unwisely ; ' and it seemed to me that a promise made 
 to a poor child, who could not enforce its fulfilment ' 
 
 She laughed unkindly. 
 
 ' You kept my promise for me. I believe you accompanied 
 her yourself. I dare say she preferred it. Really, my dear 
 Otho, what can this trivial matter concern either you or mel 
 The girl has gone back to her island. Let her stay there and 
 marry her cousin.' 
 
 'I wish she may. But I doubt whether she will do so now.' 
 
 * Because you sailed with her across the sea 1 It was very 
 wrong of 3'ou, though probably very natural, if you took the 
 occasion to conter Jleurettes \ ' 
 
 ' I do not care for those jests from you to me. It is what 
 you yourself have said to her which will have probably poisoned 
 her contentment for the rest of her days.' 
 
 She yawned a little behind her hand and gave him a sign of 
 dismissal. 
 
 'Pray let me hear no more about her,' she said coldly.
 
 112 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' And if you Avill forgive nie for saying so — I am tired — good- 
 night.' 
 
 ' Will you not send away your -women ? ' said Othmar in a 
 low tone, with a flush of irritation on his face. 
 
 ' Xo, thanks — good-night.' 
 
 He hesitated a moment, mastering a great anger which rose 
 up in him ; then he touched her hand coldly with his lips and 
 left the room. 
 
 ' If she thinks she will be able to treat me as she did that 
 
 poor humble dead fool ' he thought with mortified im- 
 
 2")atience. 
 
 With the waywardness of human nature he wished for that 
 mere human fondness which probably, he knew, had he had it, 
 Avould have soon tired and palled on him. 
 
 As he went out from her presence now, he thought, he 
 knew not why, of the girl Damaris. What warmth on those 
 untouched lips ! what deep wells of emotion in those darksome 
 eyes ! what treasures of aflection in that faithful and frank 
 heart ! Poor little soul 1 — and the best he could wish her was 
 to live in dull content beside Gros Louis. 
 
 Nadine heard the doors close one after another, as he left 
 ■ her apartments, with a little smile about her mouth. 
 
 ' How easy it is to punish them,' she thought ; ' and to think 
 there are women who do not know how 1 ' 
 
 The power of punishment was always sweet to her ; it 
 seemed to her that when a woman had lost it she had lost everj'- 
 thing that made life worth living. She had not heard that he 
 had accompanied Damaris home himself because she had not 
 inquired about it, but she had guessed that he had done so. It 
 was a silly thing to have done, exaggerated, quixotic ; but then 
 he had those coups de tete at intervals ; he had always had them 
 in great things and small ; they made him poetic and picturesque, 
 but occasionally they made him absurd. He seemed to her to 
 have been absurd now ; he could have sent the girl home with a 
 gardener or a servant, with anybody who could handle a boat, if 
 she must have gone home at all : she herself did not see the 
 necessity. But a vague irritation against Damaris came into 
 her as she sank to sleep between her sheets of lawn. 
 
 Une sensitive, luic cutctee ! If there were any two qualities 
 ■wearisome to others were they not those ? Is o one was allowed 
 to be either nervous or headstrong in her world. "Wlien she 
 came in contact with either fault she was annoyed, as when gas 
 escaped or a horse was restive. 
 
 ' She has talent, and I would have aided her,' she thought, 
 'but since she is obstinate and thankless, let her marry Gros 
 Louis and have a dozen children and forget all aVjout Esther 
 and Hermione. The Avorld, on tlie whole, wants olives and 
 oranges more than actresses, good or bad. Myself, I never
 
 OTHMAR. 113 
 
 understand why one sliould wish to see a play represented at all 
 when one can read it ; it argues great feebleness of imagination 
 to require optical and oral assistance.' 
 
 The next day, however, when she saw Othmar she said to 
 him with her most gracious grace and that charm with wliich 
 she could invest her slightest word : 
 
 ' 1 think you were right, my friend, and I was wrong, about 
 that poor little girl on her island. I did not behave very well 
 to her. I sought her, and ought to have made her of more 
 account. Shall I go and see her again, or what shall I do to 
 make her amends 1 ' 
 
 Othmar kissed her hand. 
 
 ' That is like yourself ! You are too great a lady to be cruel 
 to a little peasant. As for amends to her, I think the kindest 
 thing you can do now is to let her forget you, and, with you, 
 the ambitions Avhich you suggested to her.' 
 
 Slie looked at him with penetration, amusement, and a 
 little scepticism. 
 
 ' She is very handsome ; do you wish her to forget yon 1 ' 
 she saii with a smile. ' I am sure you must have told her you 
 will go and see her again.' 
 
 Othmar was annoyed to feel himself a little embarrassed. 
 
 ' I told her I would see her again some time, but I did not 
 say wliether this year or next.' 
 
 His wife laughed. 
 
 ' I was sure you did ! Well, then, you can go and see her 
 at once, and take her some present from me.' 
 
 ' If you will allow me to say so, I think a present will only 
 painfully emphasise the dill'erencc of cast between you and her.' 
 
 ' You have des cq)ergus trcs fins sometimes ! That is a very 
 delicate one, and perhaps correct, though a little pedantic. 
 \Vell, go and see her, and say anything in my name that you 
 think will smooth her ruGled feathers and restore her peace. I 
 think we should have another Desck'e in her ; but perhaps you 
 are riglit, that it will be better to let her marry her ship-builder. 
 Wait ; you may take her this book from me. That cannot 
 oU'end her.' 
 
 She took off her table a volume of the ' Legendes des Siecles,' 
 an edition de luxe, illustrated by great artists, bound by JMarius 
 Michel, illustrated by Hedouin, and published by Dentu, and 
 in the llyleaf of it she wrote, ' From Nadege Fedorevna Platoli", 
 Countess Othmar.' Then she gave it to her husband. 
 
 ' I am certainly not going there to-day, nor for many days,' 
 he said as he took it. 
 
 She smiled as she glanced at him. 
 
 ' Are you sure you are not 1 Well, take it when you do go.' 
 
 * I shall go, if at all, only as your ambassador.' 
 
 • That is rather prudishly and puritanically put. Why 
 
 I
 
 ii4 OTIIMAR. 
 
 should you not say honestly that the girl is very pretty, and 
 that you like to look at her ] I assure you it will not distress 
 me.' 
 
 'I could not hope that it would,' said Othmar rather bitterly, 
 as Paul of Lemberg entered the room. 
 
 There were times when the serene indifference to his actions 
 which his wife displayed found liim ungrateful ; times when he 
 almost wished for tlic warmth of interest which the impatience 
 of jealousy would have shown. Jealousy is an odious thing, a 
 ridiculous, an intolerable, a foolisli and fretful and fierce 
 passion, which is as wearing to the sufferer from it as to those 
 who create it ; and yet, unless a woman be jealous of him, a 
 man is always angrily certain that she is indiflercnt to him. 
 Jealousy is a flattery and a homage to him, even whilst it is an 
 irritation and an annoyance : it assures him that he is loved 
 even whilst it wears and whittles his own love away. But 
 jealousy was a thing at once foolish and fond, hiuniliating and 
 humble, which was altogether impossible to the serenity and 
 the security of the proud self-appreciation in which his wife 
 passed her existence. 
 
 In a week's time she had forgotten that she had ever seen 
 Damaris Berarde ; but in a year's time Othmar did not forget 
 that lie had done so. 
 
 A few days later Loris Loswa was ushered into their pre- 
 sence ; he had the sullen perturbed expression of a child 
 baulked in its wish, or deprived of some toy. 
 
 ' Loswa looks as if he had had an adventure,' she said as he 
 entered. 'He is one of the few people to whom these things 
 still happen.' 
 
 'I have been both shot at and nearly drowned, Madame,' 
 replied Loswa. 'But that would not matter much if it were 
 not that I have had also the greatest of disappointments.' 
 
 ' Disappointment and assassination together are certainly too 
 much in the same day for one person. Tell me ycnu- sttiry.' 
 
 'I have been to Bonaventurc,' said Loswa, and paused. 
 He looked distressed and annoyed, and had lost that airy non- 
 chalance and that provoking air of conscious seductiveness 
 which so greatly irritated his comrades of the ateliers who had 
 not his success either in art or in society. 
 
 ' To Bonaventure, of course,' said his hostess, as she glanced 
 at Othmar with a smile. ' Everyone is going to Bonaven- 
 ture ; it will very soon see as many picnics as the lie Ste. 
 Marguerite.' 
 
 ' Not if the tourists be received as I have been,' said Loswa, 
 in Avhose tone there was an irritated regret which was not hidden 
 by the lightness of his manner. 'Jean Berarde is a madman. 
 I took a little sailing-boat Ivom. Villefranche this morning, and 
 bade them take mo to the island. When we reached there, I
 
 O 7 /I MAR. 
 
 115 
 
 left the boatmen on the beach and climbed the passerclh as 
 usual, but I had not got halfway up the cliff before a bullet 
 whistled past me, and I was warned that if I stirred a step 
 fartlier I should be shot like a dog. I could not see who spoke, 
 but the voice came from above. I replied that I was Loris 
 Loswa, a painter from Paris, and that I merely wished to be 
 permitted to finish a sketch which I had taken there a few days 
 earlier. I presume that this was the worst thing that I could 
 have said, for I received a second bullet, wliich this time passed 
 through the crown of my hat. The person who fired was still 
 invisible amongst the olives above. At the same moment some 
 hands clutched my ankles so suddenly and forcibly that I lost 
 my footing and fell headlong down the ladder through the 
 brushwood to the beach. I was stunned for a few minutes, 
 and when I idealised where I was, the man Eaphael, mindful, I 
 suppose, of the napoleons he had had, bogged my pardon for 
 liaving made me descend in such a summary mode, but said 
 that, had he not done so, Jean Be'rarde would have killed me. 
 Raj^hael was in a great tremor himself, and urged me to go 
 away on the instant, adding that " le vieux," as he called him, 
 was resolute to shoot all tres2:>asser3 without regard to rank or 
 right, and had put a notice up to that effect on the rocks. " But 
 it is against the law," I said to him. "Eh, monsieur!" said 
 Rajjliael ; "he is the law to himself here, and he is mad, quite 
 mad — un fou furicux — since the little one came back from your 
 friends. He has sent her away, heaven only knows where, and 
 not a soul will be let to set foot on the island." "Sent her 
 away ? " I cried to him. " But I have not finished her portrait." 
 The wretch did not care. " What does that matter ? " he said. 
 " What matters is that the one bit of gaiety and goodness in 
 the place is gone. My children are crying for Damaris all the 
 day long." I used bad words about his children ; what did 
 they matter to me ? And I asked him how the old brute had 
 learned that his granddaughter had been out that night : had he 
 come home earlier than she? "Yes," said Raphael, "he did 
 come home an hour before her, but he need not ever have 
 known anything, for we would, all of us, have kept her little 
 secret ; even old Catherine would never have told of her. But 
 Damaris was always headstrong, and in some things foolish, 
 poor child ; and she would have it that it was cowardly and 
 wrong not to tell Berarde herself ; and so, do what we would, 
 she would go straight in and tell him ; and he — he had not had 
 a good day's trade, and he had heard of a debtor who had 
 drowned himself, and left no goods worth a centime, and so he 
 was in the vilest of humours that evening ; and when she 
 related to him what she had done, he up with his big elm stall 
 and struck her down, and my wife and I thought she was dead ; 
 and old Catherine was cursing, and the children were screaming, 
 
 -1 2
 
 Ii6 OTIIMAR. 
 
 and the dogs hovding. Such a scene ! sucli a scene ! How- 
 ever, she was not injured, and in the evening he took her away 
 hy himself in the open boat, and what he did with her nobody 
 knows. He made Catherine pack al] her clothes in a great 
 Innidlc, and so 1 do not think that lie killed her. I suppose he 
 took her to the mainland, to some convent perhaps, though he 
 does not love them. I dare say he would have made away with 
 Catherine too, only he wants her to cook his dinner, and he 
 knows there is nobody else who can manage the bees." That 
 Avas all that I could make Raphael say ; he was in a great state of 
 terror, and urged me to go aivay at once. He said the old man 
 might come down on to the beach for aught he knew. As 
 Damaris was gone, there was little to be gained by remaining, 
 so I left the island. In returning we encountered a white 
 squall ; the boat capsized, we clung to her for half an hour, 
 Avhen we were picked up by a yawl which was going to Yille- 
 franche. That is all my story ; I have been bruised and 
 soaked, but all that would not matter if I could only finish my 
 picture. But where is Damaris ? ' 
 
 ' It is really an adventure,' said Nadine, ' and you have 
 told it di'amatically. As for your picture, you deserve not to 
 complete it, for you neglected her disgracefully when she was 
 here.' 
 
 ' 1 hope this old tyrant has not hurt her ; but a ruftian who 
 fires at one from his olive-trees as if one were a fox or a 
 stoat ' 
 
 ' Of course he will not hurt her ; he will either keep her in 
 a convent to punish her, or, as he does not love convents, marry 
 her at once to liei- boat-builder.' 
 
 Othmar did not say anything ; he had heard Loswa's narrative 
 with regret. 
 
 ' Poor, brave little soul ! ' he thought ; ' and it was I who told 
 her that it was her duty not to conceal what she had done.' 
 
 ' A caprice may cost something sometimes you see, Madame, 
 said B^thune with a smile to his hostess. 
 
 * She may become a second Desclee yet,' said Nadine. ' Her 
 grandfather will not be wise if he drive her to desperation. 1 
 am sorry he struck her : it was brutal.' 
 
 ' Perhaps we hurt her quite as much,' said Othmar, which 
 were the first words he had si^oken on the subject. 
 
 His wife smiled. 
 
 ' I know that is your idee fixe. I do not agree with you. If 
 she marry the shipwright she will now do it with her cj^es open. 
 It is always well to know what one is aliout.' 
 
 ' You have made it impossible for her to marry the ship- 
 wright.' 
 
 ' I really do not see why. Perhaps you mean your com- 
 pliments or Paul's music'
 
 OTHMAR. 117 
 
 ' Paul's music, and other things. You showed her the workl 
 as Mepliistopheles showed Faust j'outh in a mirror.' 
 
 ' Faust was, after all, Mepliistopheles' debtor.' 
 
 ' About that there may be two opinions.' 
 
 * After all, she would not have been punished if she had not 
 spoken.' 
 
 ' You must admire that at least. Courage is the only quality 
 ■which you respect.' 
 
 ' I admire it, but it was not wise.' 
 
 ' What heroic thing ever is % ' 
 
 He went away, leaving her presence with some irintationand 
 some discontent. He knew that he had only said what was best 
 for Damaris when he had counselled her to have no concealment 
 from her grandfather ; but the idea of the child's having suffered 
 through his advice, the thought of her taken from her sunny 
 happy life amongst her orange-groves and honey-scented air, 
 and all the gay fresh freedom of her seas, into some strange and 
 unknown place — perhaps into some forced and joyless union — 
 hurt him with almost a personal pain. 
 
 The wild rose had paid dearly for its one day in the 
 hothouse. 
 
 ' Why could not Nadege let her alone 1 ' he thought angrily 
 as he looked across the shining sea to the gold of the far distance, 
 where westward the island which had sheltered the happy child- 
 hood of Damaris lay unseen. 
 
 CHAPTER XYI. 
 
 A FEW days later they left the coast for Amyot and Paris. 
 There was no record left of their visit to Bonaventure save the 
 rough sketch which Loris Loswa had made, and from which he 
 still meant some time, when he should have leisure, to create a 
 great picture. One day Othmar bought the sketch of him at 
 one of chose exaggerated prices which Loswa could command for 
 any trifle which he had touched. 
 
 When his wife saw it hanging in his room in Paris she 
 laughed. 
 
 ' You are determined,' she said, ' that I shall not forget my 
 DescUe manquee.^ 
 
 ' I do Jiot think j'ou were kind to her,' said Otlimar. 
 
 ' I did not intend to be unkind, certainly. She gave me an 
 impression of force, of talent, of a future : the sketch suggests 
 that. But no doubt she has married the shipwright by this 
 time. Little girls begin by dreaming of Rene' and Nemorin, 
 but they end in making the x^ot anfeii for Jacques Bonhomme,'
 
 ii8 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' I do not think she will ever marry the boat-builder. I told 
 you that we made it impossible for her.' 
 
 ' I know you did ; but then you have always des billevesees 
 romanesques. The steward at St. Pharamond could tell you what 
 has become of her.' 
 
 ' I have inquired. She has not returned to the island ; her 
 grandfather never speaks of her, and no one knows anything at 
 all about her. ' 
 
 Nadine smiled. 
 
 ' All ! you have inquired already 1 I thought she impressed 
 you very much.' 
 
 ' Not at all,' said Othmar irritably, as he glanced at the sketch 
 on which the sunshine was falling. ' But I was sorry that any 
 caprice of yours should have cost anyone so dear.' 
 
 ' Is that all 1 And you are sure she has not married her 
 cousin 1 ' 
 
 ' They say not. He is still living at St. Tropez.' 
 
 ' Then she must be shut up in some convent.' 
 
 « Or dead.' 
 
 ' Oh no, my dear, she had too much life in her to die. Be- 
 sides, her grandfather would have made her death known. I am 
 sure she will live and have a history, probably such a history as 
 IVIadame Tallien's or as Madame Favart's. She carries it in her 
 countenance. ' 
 
 ' Five fathoms of blue water were perhaps the better fate,' 
 said Othmar. 
 
 ' You are very poetic,' said his wife with her unkindest 
 smile. ' I always thought you had a touch of genius yourself, 
 only it never took speech or shape. You are a Dante bom 
 dumb.' 
 
 ' Then you should pity me indeed,' said Othmar, with 
 irritation. 
 
 He kept the sketch hanging in the room which he most often 
 used at his house in Paris. It served to retain in his memory 
 that night upon the sea when he had seen the figure of Damaris 
 disappear in the moonlight, amidst the silver of the olive-trees, 
 while the fragrance of the orange-scented air and the breath of 
 the sweet-smelling narcissus were Avafted to him from the island 
 pastures out over the starlit waters. 
 
 ' You will end in falling in love with that picture,' said his 
 wife to him with much amusement. He was angered at the 
 suggestion. His regret for Damaris was wliolly impersonal. 
 
 ' We did her a cruel kindness,' he thought sometimes when 
 he glanced at it. ' Wherever she be, and whatever she live to 
 become, she will always carry a tliorn in her heart, because she 
 will always have the sentiment that slie might have been some- 
 thing which she is not. It is tlie saddest, idea tliat can pursue 
 anyone through life. Perliaps she will marry the boat-builder
 
 OTHMAR. 119 
 
 and have a dozen children, but that will not prevent her some- 
 times, when she sees a fine smiset, or sits in the moonlight on 
 the shore waiting for the sloop to come in, from being haunted 
 by the thorght that if things had gone otherwise she might have 
 been in the great world. And then, just for that passing 
 moment, while the ghost of that "might have been" is with 
 her, she will hate the man who comes home in the sloop, and 
 will not even care for the children who are shouting on the 
 beach.' 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 They were again at Aymot in the golden August weather, when 
 no place pleased its mistress better than the cool and stately 
 palace set upon its shining waters and stone piles, with the deep 
 forests of France drawn in an impenetrable screen of verdure 
 around its majestic gardens. She had a constant succession of 
 guests, and a kaleidoscopic infinitude of pastimes. Great singcni 
 came down and warbled by moonlight to replace the nightingales 
 grown mute ; great actors came down also and played on the 
 stage which had been built and ornamented by Primaticcio ; 
 every kind of ingenuity in novelty and diversion was exercised 
 for her by cunning intelligences and brilliant wits. The weeks 
 of Amyot were likely to become as celebrated in social history 
 as the grandes nuits de Scecmv ; everyone invited to them re- 
 ceived the highest brevet of fashion that the world could give. 
 Other people were immensely pleased and amused at Amyot and 
 at her other houses : she alone was not. Her intelligence asked 
 too much ; the whole world was dull and finite for her. 
 
 She had known the greatest triumphs, the highest heiglits 
 of passion, the most voluptuous ecstasies, the most brilliant of 
 successes, and they had all seemed to her rather tame, quickly 
 exhausted. Faustina appeared to her as absurd, and coui- 
 manded her sympathies as little, as Penelope. 
 
 Life's little round is all too short for satisfaction in it ; it 
 is so soon over ; it is so crowded and so transient ; to have 
 childreft who may do less ill or do less well than we, to pursue 
 aims or ambitions which have no novelty in them and little 
 wisdom, to love, to cease to love ; to dream and die ; this is the 
 whole of it, and the sweetest of all things in it are its child- 
 hood which is ignorant that it is happy, and its passion which 
 is no sooner made happy than it pales and falls. 
 
 ' If only life were like a play ! ' she thought. ' Any drama- 
 tist knows that in his last act his movement must be accelerated, 
 and his incidents accumulated, till they culminate in a climax. 
 But in life, on the contrary, everything waxes slower aud
 
 120 OTHMAR. 
 
 sloAver, everything grows duller and dullcn-, incidents become 
 veiy scarce, and there is no dmonanznt at all — unless we call 
 the pr-ests.with their holy oil, and the journey to the church- 
 yard behind the mourning-coaches, a clenouemertt. But it cannot 
 be called a climax : the going out of a spent lamp is not a 
 climax.' 
 
 Her lamp was far from spent ; and yet a sense of the dull- 
 ness of life, generally, often came to her. She had everything 
 she had over wished for, and yet it left her with a vague senti- 
 ment of dissausfaction. 
 
 ' I wonder if he is really contented,' she thought sometimes 
 d(i Ltfully of Othmar. It seemed to her quite impossible he 
 slioLild be. Why should he bo when she Avas not I And yet 
 there was no one she would have liked better or so well. 
 
 The sameness of human nature irritated her. Surveying 
 history, it seemed to her that character, like events, must have 
 been much more varied in other times than hers ; say in the 
 Fronde, in the Crusades, in the time of tlie Italian Republics, 
 even in the days of the Consulate, when all Europe was drunk 
 with war like wine. 
 
 Nowadays people are always saying the same thing ; enter- 
 tainments resemble each other like peas ; wlierevcr the world 
 gathers it takes its OAvn monotony and tedium with it, and 
 repea's itself with the dull perseverance of a cuckoo-clock. 
 
 She endeavoured to infuse some originality into her own 
 society and her own pleasures ; but she did not consider that 
 she succeeded. People were t<io dull. Why Avas it ? Nobody 
 Avas dull in Charles the Second's time, or in the days of Louis 
 Quinze, or of Henri Quatre. At Amyot, if anywhere, she suc- 
 ceeded, but, though her invitations to the house parties there 
 were passiunately coveted, and everyone else was so exceedingly 
 delighted with them, the utmost she could ever say was that 
 she had not been too greatly bored. Modern existence was not 
 dramatic enough to please her. 
 
 ' And yet if it be ever dramatic you say it is melodramatic, 
 and ridicule it as vieuxjeu,' said Othmar to her once. 
 
 ' No doubt I do ; one is not happily obliged to be consis- 
 tent,' she replied. * We are too intellectual or too indiflerent 
 nuwadays to have a Guise slaughtered in our antechamber, or 
 ;:n Urlnll' assassinated by our bedside, but the consequence is 
 that life is dull. It is a journey in a ira;/oji lit, one is half 
 asleep all the time ; it has no longer the iiicturesijue incidents 
 of a jiiurney on horseback across moor and mountain, with the 
 chance ot meeting jMalatesta or the Balafre en route.' 
 
 ' Yet men have died fur you ! ' 
 
 ' Oil, my dear ! they never did it with any picturesqucness 
 at all ! Wliat picturesciueness can there be I A man lalls in a 
 duel ; he is put in a cab with a doctor ! A man kills himself
 
 OTHMAR. 121 
 
 with a revolver ; there is again a doctor, and also, probably, a 
 policeman ! ' 
 
 ' Which does not prevent the emotions which lead to those 
 incidents from being as genuine as they used to be.' 
 
 ' I know that is your theory. It is not mine. The passions 
 are nowadays all crusted with conventionality, like life. Look 
 at ourselves, as I have said to you before.' 
 
 ' Well % What of ourselves 1 ' 
 
 ' You and I think ourselves very original, but in reality we 
 are the servants of conventionality. I told you so last winter. 
 Wlien we were free and had the world before us, we could 
 think of nothing more original than to marry each other like 
 Annette and Lubin, like John and Mary. We had no imagina- 
 tion. We thought we should do all sorts of fine things, but 
 we have not done them. We have merely just drojiped back 
 into the routine of the world like all other people.' 
 
 ' I do not see what else we could have done,' replied Othmar, 
 somewhat feebly as he was aware. 
 
 ' What a conventional reply ! ' she said impatiently. * That 
 is just what I am saying. Neither of us had imagination, or 
 perhaf)S courage, enougli to strike out any new path, though wc 
 thought we were so much above other people. Both you and I 
 have enough of originality to be dissatisfied with the world as it 
 is, but we have not originality enough to create another one. 
 People who have the perception which belongs to the poc*^if 
 temperament, as you and I have, without its creative power, are 
 greatly to be pitied. Both you and I have something of poetry 
 — something of heroism — in us, but it never comes to anything. 
 We remain in the world, and conform to it.' 
 
 ' I would lead any life you suggested — out of the world if 
 you pleased.^ 
 
 ' Ah, but I do not please,' she said, with a little sigh. * That 
 is just the mischief. You remember when we went to your 
 Dalmatian castle the first year ; the solitude was enchant- 
 ing, the loneliness of the sea and the shore was exquisite, the 
 mountains seemed draAvn behind us like a curtain, shutting out 
 all noise and connnonness and only enclosing our own dreams ; 
 but after a little time you looked at me, I looked at you, and 
 we both tried to hide from each other that we yawned. One 
 morning wlien tliere was a rough wind on the sea and the first 
 snow on the hills, I said to you, "What if we go to Paris?" 
 and you were relieved beyond expression, only you would not 
 say so. Now, if we had been poets — really poets, you and I — 
 we should never have quitted Zama for Paris. We should have 
 let the whole world go.' 
 
 Othmar did not well know what to reply, because he was 
 conscious of a certain truth in her words. 
 
 ' I am not a jaoet, you have often told me so,' he said with
 
 122 OTHMAR. 
 
 some bitterness. * The atmosphere I was born in was too thick 
 and yellow with gold for the I'arnassian bees to lly to my cradle. 
 The supreme privilege of the poet is an iiuperishable youth, and 
 I do not think that I was ever young ; they did not let me 
 be so.' 
 
 ' You were so for a little while when you first loved me,' 
 she said with a smile ; ' that is why I Avonder we had not more 
 imagination at that time. Anybody could live the life we live 
 now. It shows what a stifling, cramping thing the world is ; 
 we who used to meditate on every possible idealic and idyllic 
 kind of existence have found that there is nothing for us to 
 do but to open our houses, surround ourselves with a crowd, 
 spend quantities of money in all commoni)lace fashions, and 
 be hated by envy and envied by stupidity. Do you remember 
 our sunlit kingdom in Persia that we were to have gone 
 to together % Well, we are as far off it a3 though we were nob 
 together.' 
 
 ' Do you mean then,' said Othmar impatiently, 'that you 
 think our life together a mistake .' ' 
 
 ' No, not quite that ; because we are more intelligent than 
 most people, only we have been unable to rise above the cum- 
 monplace ; unable to keep our iron at a white heat. Our 
 existence looks very brilliant, no doubt, to those outside it, but 
 in real ti'uth there is a poverty of invention al)iiut it which 
 makes me feel ashamed of my own want of originality.' 
 
 She laughed a little ; her old laugh, which always chilled the 
 hearts of men. 
 
 She had always foreseen the termination of their pilgrimage 
 of joy in that mortuary chai)el of lifeless bones and motionless 
 dust to which the lovers' path through tlie roses and raptures 
 was so sure to lead. V>\\i he, man like, had been so certain that 
 the roses would never fade, that the raptures would never 
 diminish ! 
 
 Othmar was sensible that he had in some manner failed to 
 fullll her expectations, and the sense of sueli a fact stiii'^s the 
 self-love of the least vain and least selfish of men. Her life 
 possessed all that any woman could in her uttermo^st exactness 
 require. All the perfect self-indulgence ami continual pageantry 
 of life which an innnense fortune can coiiinuuid were always 
 hers ; her children by him were beautiful and of great promist.', 
 physical and mental ; her world still obeyed her slightest sign, 
 and her slightest whim was gratified ; men still found the most 
 fatal sorcery in her careless glance, and society oll'ered to her 
 all that it possessed. If this sense of disappointment, of dis- 
 illusion, of dissatisfaction were really with her, it could oidy be 
 so because he himself, as the companion of her life, failed to 
 realise what she liad expected in him —was unhappy enough to 
 weary her, as all others before him had done.
 
 OTHMAR. 123 
 
 A vainer man would have laid the blame on her, and have 
 arrived, through vanity, at the perception that it was her tem- 
 perament and not his character which was at fault. But all the 
 flattery which every rich and powerful man daily receives had 
 failed to make Othmar vain. His self-esteem was very modest 
 in its proportions, and he attributed the fact of his wife's appa- 
 rent indifference to him humbly enough to his own demei'its. 
 
 'I have not the talent of amusing her,' he thought. 'I 
 have been always too grave— have taken life too sadly to be the 
 companion of a woman of her wit. I have never done any- 
 thing of which she can be very proud with that sort of pride 
 which would be the sweetest flattery to her ; the years slip 
 away with me and bring me no occasion, at least no capability, 
 of the kind of distinction which she would appreciate. 1 cannot 
 be a Skobeletf or a Goi'tschakoll" ; I cannot make that renown 
 which might arrest her fancy and please her amour projyre ; she 
 lias loved me possibly as much as she can love, but as she finds 
 that I am made of the common clay of ordinary humanity, I 
 become not much more to her than all those dead men whom 
 she has tired of and forgotten.' 
 
 But whilst his reason told him tliis, his heart j'earned to 
 disbelieve it, and his pride refused a meek submission to it. 
 There was something in her fugitive, delicately disdainful, 
 capriciously insecure, which was certain to sustain the passion 
 of man, because it constantly stimulated it ; her concessions 
 were made to his desires not her own ; she never shared his 
 weakness even whilst she was indulgent to it. 
 
 ' I have absolutely never known yet whether you have ever 
 loved me ! ' he said to her once, and she replied, with her little 
 indulgent, mj'sterious smile : 
 
 ' How should you know what I do nut know myself ? ' 
 
 It was a part, and no small part, of the ascendency she had 
 over him ; it stimulated his affections, because it perpetually 
 stinted them ; it made satiety impossible with her. 
 
 Yet all which excited his passions and secured the continu- 
 ance of her influence over him, left him more and more con- 
 scious of a void at his heart which she would never fill, because 
 a nature cannot bestow more than it possesses. All the intel- 
 lectual charm she had for him had a certain coldness in it ; her 
 incorrigible irony, her inveterate analysis, her natural attitude 
 of observation and of mockery liefore the foibles and follies 
 and affections of mankind, enchanting as they were, were with- 
 out warmth as they were without pity. It was the brilliant 
 play of electric light on polished steel. Sometimes, with the 
 wayward inconsistency of human wishes, he would have pre- 
 ferred the glow from some simple fire of the hearth. 
 
 There were times when the feeling which met his own left 
 his heart cold. He had never wholly ceased to feel that he was
 
 124 OTHMAR. 
 
 always in a measure outside her life. He would have been 
 ashamed to confess to her many youthful w^caknesses, many 
 romantic impulses which often moved him ; there were many 
 lover-like follies which would have been natural and sweet to 
 him, which he had early learned to control and dismiss, un- 
 yielded to because he was afraid of that slight ironical smile, 
 and that contemptuous little word with which she had the 
 power to arrest the quick tide of any impetuous emotion. 
 
 The exce.-scs of passion and the force of emotion always 
 seemed to her sliglitly absurd ; she had yielded to both for his 
 sake more than she had ever thought to do ; but her intelli- 
 gence alway held reign over her with much greater dominance 
 than lier feelings ever obtained. Tliere were moments when 
 he felt as if he asked her for bread, and she gave him a stone ; 
 a most polished stone of magical charm, of exquisite transpa- 
 rtncy, of occalt power, but still a stone, when he merely wished 
 for the plain s.veet bread of simple sympathy. 
 
 Onc9, in riding alone through the forests of Amyot, his 
 horse put its foot in a rabbit's hole and threw him. He was 
 unhurt, and rose and remounted. But he thought as he rode 
 onward : ' If I had been disiigured, crippled, made an invalid 
 for life, how would she have regarded me 1 ' 
 
 With pity, no doubt, but probably with aversion ; certainly 
 with indillereuce. She would have brouglit her exquisite grace, 
 her cool nonchalant smile, her delicate fragrant presence to his 
 bedside, and would have come there every day, no doubt, and 
 have been careful that he should want for nothing ; but Avould 
 there have been the blinding tears of a passionate sorrow in her 
 eyes, would her cheek have gi'own hollow and her hair white 
 with long vigil, Avould her whole world have been found within 
 the four walls of his sick room \ 
 
 He thought not. 
 
 He sighed as he rode through the green glades of the great 
 ■woods where she had held her Court of Love. 
 
 Of love no one could speak with such science and surety as 
 she. She had known it in all its phases, studied it in all its 
 madness, accepted it in all its sacrifices ; on no tlicme would her 
 silver speech be more eloiiiient ; and love had been given to her 
 as the widest of all her kingdoms. But had she really known 
 it ever ? Had not that which her own breast had harboured 
 always been the mere impulse of curiosity, the mere exercise of 
 ])0\ver, the mere chilhiess of analysis sucli as tliat with which 
 the physiologist gazes on the bared nerves of the living or- 
 ganism \ After all, wliy liad men cared so much for her \ Only 
 ))ecause she had been a-i unmoved as the moon. Men are 
 children ; they long for what they cannot clasp. He himself 
 had only loved her so long, despite the chilling and dulling 
 etiect of marriage, because lie liail always felt that he possessed
 
 OTHMAR. 125 
 
 so little real hold upon her that any clay she might take it into 
 her fancy to leave him, not out of unkindness but out of enmd. 
 
 Sometimes he thought with a curious compassion of Na- 
 praxine. He thought of him now, and for a moment his own 
 heart grew hard against her as he rode through the beautiful 
 summer world of his woods ; hard as had grown the hearts of 
 men who, dying for her sake, had felt that they had given their 
 life for a smile, for a jest, for a chimera, for a caprice— given it 
 away unthanked. 
 
 But then, when he entered his house again and saw her, ho 
 forgave her and loved her ; he cared more still for one touch of 
 her cool white hand, the favour of one careless smile cast to 
 him, than he cared for the whole world of women — women 
 who would willingly have seen him forget his allegiance to her, 
 and have consoled him for all her defects. 
 
 'Otho is uxorious, like Belisarius, like Bismarck,' said 
 Friedrich Othmar, with an unpleasant smile. ' And alas ! he 
 is neither a great soldier nor a great statesman, to make the 
 weakness respected either by the world or by his wife.' 
 
 Othmar had overheard the speech, and it had made him 
 irritated, and afraid lest he ever looked absurd. 
 
 'Yet,' he thought bitterly, 'if she were still the wife of 
 Napraxine, no one would ever see anything singular in any 
 weakness or madness that I might commit for her ! ' 
 
 Between his uncle and himself few intimate words ever 
 passed. After the death of Yseulte a tacit understanding had 
 been come to between them that neither should ever name 
 those causes, whether great or small, which she had had for 
 jjain and jealous sorrow in her brief life's space. It was a sub- 
 ject on which they could never have touched without a breach 
 irrevocable and eternal in their friendship. 
 
 Friedrich Othmar visited at their houses, caressed their 
 children, preserved all outward amity with both of them, and 
 devoted all the energies of his last years and of his inmense 
 experience to the interests of the house which he had honoured, 
 served, and loved so long, but with neither his nephew nor his 
 nepliew's wife did he ever pass tlie limits of a conventional and 
 courteous intercourse, which had neither affection in it nor any 
 exchange of confidence. 
 
 Once or twice the worldly-wise and harsh old man did a 
 thing which a few years before, in anyone else, he would have 
 regarded as the most flimsy and foolish of sentimentalities. He 
 took the little Xenia with him into the gardens of St. Phara- 
 mond, and made her gather with her own small hands a quantity 
 of violets ; then he led her to the tomb of Yseulte, and bade 
 her lay them on it. She had been buried there, though a 
 sepulchre sculptured by Mercierhad been raised to her memory 
 at Amyot.
 
 126 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' "Why are you not her child ? ' he said to her. ' Why are you 
 not ? She would have loved you better than your own mother 
 can.' 
 
 The child scattered her violets, then came and leaned her 
 arms upon his knee and looked up at him witli serious eyes. 
 
 ' You are crying ! ' she said, touching softly two great tears 
 which had fallen on his cheeks. Then she added gravely : ' I 
 thought you were too old ! ' 
 
 'I too should have thought so,' said Friedrich Othmar 
 bitterly. ' It is a sign that my end is near.' 
 
 And he envied those credulous, unintellectiial, happy imbe- 
 ciles Avho could believe that that ' end ' was only the opening 
 of the portals of a wider, fairer, greater life ; he whose reason 
 told him that for his own strong keen braiu and muUiforni 
 knowledge and accumulated wisdom and fierce love of life, as 
 for tlie youthful limbs and the fair soul and the pure body of 
 the dead girl there, that end was only the ' end ' of all things : 
 cruel corruption, hideous putridity, blank nothingness, eternal 
 silence. 
 
 ' What is the use of it all % Wliat is the use ? ' he said to 
 the startled child, as he took her hand and led her from the 
 tomb. What was the use of any life or any death % What had 
 been the use of Yseulte's % 
 
 One day he found before her mausoleum at Amyot the most 
 mondaine of women : Blanche Princesse de Laon, who, in her 
 childish days, had been Blanchette de Vannes. 
 
 ' You, too, remember her 1 ' he said in surprise. 
 
 Blanche de Laon replied roughly : 
 
 ' I loved her ; — tout le mo7ide est hcte '\me foh ! ' 
 
 She stood before the marble sepulchre where INIercier had 
 made the angels of Pity and of Youth weeping. She Avas not 
 twenty years of age, but she knew the world like her glove. 
 She Avas cruel, cold, avaricious, sensual, steeped in frivolity and 
 intrigue as in a bath of wine, but underneath all that there was 
 one little spot of memory, of regret, of tenderness in her 
 nature ; as far as she had been capable of affection she had 
 loved Yseulte. 
 
 ' Tkns ! ' she said, as she stood beside the sepulchre. ' Do 
 yon think it has succeeded— your nephew's last marriage 1 ' 
 
 'I believe so,' replied 'Friedrich Othmar with surprise. 
 'Yes, certainly, I should say so ; tliey seem quite in accord; 
 he is devoted to her still.' 
 
 ' Ticns!' she said again, and she s-trnck the marble of the 
 tomb sharply with the long ivory stick of her sun unibrell;i. 
 ' I watch them like a cat a mouse. I will bo even with her still ; 
 the first time there is a little crack in what you call their happi- 
 ness, I shall bo there— and I will widen it. Have you seen the 
 drivers of Monte Carlo make an open wound in their horses'
 
 OTHMAR. 127 
 
 flank on purpose? Wei], tliis is how they clo it. A fly settles 
 and leaves a little piece of braised skin, the men rub that little 
 place with sand, it widens and widens, they rub in more sand, 
 tlie sun and the flies do the I'est.' 
 
 Then she struck her ivory stick once more on the marble 
 parapet of the great tomb. 
 
 ' She died for them ! She was so foolish always. But there 
 was something great in it. We are not great like that. If he 
 only remembered, I would forgive him for her sake. But he 
 never remembers. He does not care. A dog might be buried 
 instead of her.' 
 
 ' You cannot be sure of that.' 
 
 ' Bah ! I am perfectly sure. He has never even understood 
 that she did die for him. He thought it was an accident ! ' 
 
 ' Husli ! ' said Friedrich Othmar harshly, but with great 
 emotion. ' She wished that he should think it so ; what right 
 have you or have I or has anyone in the wide world to betiay 
 her last secret if we guess it ? It has gone to the gi-ave with 
 her, like her dead children.' 
 
 ' I betray it no more than you ! ' she rei)lied with asperity. 
 ' I have given no hint of it to any living soul ; wlien Toinon 
 said it was a suicide I struck her, I made her hold her peace. 
 I was a child then, and all these years since I have never said a 
 word ; but you, you know ; you know as well as I.' 
 
 ' It was not a suicide, it was a heroism. If there were a 
 God, a great God, He Avould have honoured it.' 
 
 ' But there are only priests ! ' said Blanchette, with her 
 bitterest smile. 
 
 They turned away together from the mausoleum, where the 
 marble figure of Yseulte seemed to lie in the peace of a dream- 
 less sleep beneath the shadowing wings of the two angels. 
 Gates of metal scroll-work let in the sunlight to this house of 
 death ; there was no darkness in it, no terror, no melancholy ; 
 white doves flew around its roof, and white roses blossomed at 
 its portals. 
 
 'Madame la Princesse de Laon,' said Friedrich Othmar 
 gravely, as they passed across the turf, ' whenever the fly begins 
 that little wound in the skin that you talked of, forbear to 
 widen it for the sake of your cousin who sleeps there ; do not 
 make her sacrifice wholly useless. What is done is done. We 
 cannot bring her back to life, and if we could she would not be 
 happy in it. There are souls too delicate and too spiritual for 
 earth. Hers was so.' 
 
 Blanche de Laon gave him no promise. She walked on over 
 the smooth sward through the labyrinths of blossom, and 
 crossed the gardens where her courtiers met her, with outcries 
 of welcome and of homage. 
 
 Sh.e was at the supreme height of coquetry and triumph and
 
 128 OTHMAR, 
 
 fasliioii. She was not beautiful in feature, but she -was dazzling 
 fair, had a marvellously perfect figure, tine, cranerie inoute, and 
 the advantage and fascination conferred by an absolute indiffer- 
 ence to all laws, hesitations and principles. She was hard as 
 her own diamonds, iilundered her lovers Avith a greed and ruth- 
 lessness which rivalled any cocotte's, kept her splendid positKni 
 by sheer force of audacity as high above the world as thougli 
 she were the most pure of women, and before she had com- 
 pleted her twenty-first year knew all that was to be known of 
 the refinements of vice, the exaggerations ot self-indulgence, 
 and the eccentricities of unbridled levity. She had supreme 
 scorn for her sister Toinon, who had espoused the Due de Ypres, 
 a hunting-noble of the Ardennes, and who spent most of her tmie 
 in the provinces chasing wolves, bears, and wild deer, and could 
 give the death-blow with her knife to an old tusked monarch of 
 the woods or a king-stag of eleven points, as surely as any hunts- 
 man in French Flanders or the Luxembourg. 
 
 The Princesse de Laon came as a guest to Amj-ot with most 
 summers or autumns. She knew tliat her host disliked lier, 
 and would willingly, liad it been possible, never have seen her 
 face ; she knew that his wife disliked her scarcely less, but that 
 knowledge increased her whim to be often at their houses, and 
 she never gave them any possible pretext to break with or to 
 slight her. Her name was included, as a matter of course, in 
 their first series of guests every season, and usually she was 
 accompanied by Laon himself ; a man of small brains and 
 admirable manners, wlio adored her, and would no more have 
 dared resent the liberties she took with his honour than he 
 would have dared to enter her presence uninvited. 
 
 ^ J^ai etudie vos moyens de punir voire meute,' she said once 
 to the chatelaine of Amyot, with a malice equal to her own. 
 '' Et je les ai rniites; tant hien que mal .'' 
 
 She was the only person in whom Nadine had ever found 
 her ecjual in high-bred insolence, in merciless raillery, m un- 
 sparing allusions, couched in the subtilties of drawing-room 
 banter or of drawing-room compliment. Blanche de Laon was 
 the only one who could fence with those slender foils of her 
 own, which could strike so surely and wound so profoundly. 
 Blanche de Laon, outwardly her devoted admirer and friend, 
 was the sole living being who could irritate her, could annoy 
 her, and could make her feel that Time, to use the words of 
 Madame de Grignan, robbed her every day of something which 
 she would never recover and could ill afford to lose. 
 
 Before this insolent youth of Blanchette she, who had been 
 Nadege Napraxine, felt almost old. 
 
 She was not old ; she was still at the height of her own 
 powers to charm. She proved it every day that she drove 
 through the streets, every night that she passed down a ball-
 
 OTHMAR. 129 
 
 room. Still Blanchette, twelve years younger than she, reign- 
 ing in her own world, repeating her own triumphs, awarding 
 the cotillion to her own lovers, made a certain sense of coming 
 age approach her. Age was not at her elbow yet, but she saw 
 his shadow in the doorway. She forgot that approaching 
 shadow at every other time, but Blanchette had the power to 
 jjoint it out to her in a thousand v/ays imperceptible to all 
 spectators. Hundreds of other young beauties grew up and 
 entered her society, and met her daily and nightly, and she 
 never thought once about them, except when she wanted them 
 for a costume quadrille at her ball in Paris or tableaux vivauts 
 at Amyot. But Blanchette forced her to think of her ; forced 
 her to see in her a rival, perhaps an equal, in those kingdoms 
 where she was wont to reign alone. Blanchette, when she let 
 her myosotis-coloured eyes gaze at her, said to her with cruel 
 pertinacity and candour : 
 
 ' You are a beautiful woman still, but you ov/e something to 
 art now ; you will have to owe more and more every year ; you 
 would not dare be seen at sunrise after the cotillion now ; soon 
 you will dance the cotillions no longei', bub your daughter will 
 dance them instead of you. How will you like it 1 You have 
 too much esjyrit to be Cleopatra. Y^ou Avill not give and take 
 love pliiltres at forty. You will have too much wit. But when 
 your empire passes you will be wretched.' 
 
 All this the blue keen eyes of Blanche de Laon alone of all 
 women said to her, anticipating the years that were to come, 
 asking in irony — 
 
 ' Tlow wilt thou bear from pity to implore 
 What once thy power from rapture could command ? ' 
 
 This is the question which every woman has to ask her- 
 self in the latter half of her life. A woman is like a carriage 
 horse ; all her beaiuv joitrs are crowded into the tirst years of 
 her life ; afterwards every year is a descent more or less rapid 
 or gradual ; after being made into an idol, after living on velvet, 
 after knowing only the gilded oats and the rosewood stall and 
 the days of delight, she and the horse both drift to neglect, 
 and hunger, and rainy weather, and the dull plodding world 
 between the shafts. The horse comes to the cab and the 
 cart ; the woman comes to middle age and old age ; he is un- 
 groomed, she is unsought ; he stands in the streets dumbly won- 
 dering why his fate is so changed ; she sits in the ball-room 
 chaperons' seat silently chafing against the lot which has become 
 hers. 
 
 Men are so fortunate there. The very best of their life 
 often comes in its later years. If a man be a poet, a soldier, .1 
 statesman, all the gilded laurels ot fame are reserved for his 
 later years ; honours crowd on him in his autumn as fast a» 
 
 a.
 
 130 or H MAR. 
 
 the leaves can fall in tlic woods. Even as a lover it is often in 
 his later years that his greatest successes and his happiest 
 passions come to hini. This is always what creates the immense 
 disparity between men and women. For men age may become 
 an apotheosis. For women it is only a dehdcle. 
 
 This will always cause disparity and discord between fhem. 
 When love has said its last word to her, it is still weaving all 
 kinds of first chapters to new stories for him. Kobody can 
 help it. It is nature. The fault lies in the ordinances of 
 modern civilisation, which have made their laws without any 
 recognition of this fact, and indeed atiects altogether to ignore 
 its existence. 
 
 She said such things as these in jest very often ; but beneath 
 tke jest there was a sorrowful and impatient foreboding. The 
 days of darkness had not come to her, but they would certainly 
 come. Having been in her way omnipotent as any Caesar, she 
 would see her laurels drop, her sceptre fall, her empire diminish. 
 A woman holds her power to charm as Balzac's hero held the 
 peau de chagrin ; little by little, at tirst imperceptibly, then 
 faster with each hour, it shrinks and shrinks until one day 
 there is nothing left — and life is over. 
 
 Life is over : though the automatic joyless mechanism of 
 living may go on for half a century more. 
 
 It is useless to say that the affections will compensate for 
 this decadence. They will do no such thing. As intelligence 
 is more and more highly cultured, and taste made more fasti- 
 dious, the power to console of the ties of family grows less and 
 less ; the mind becomes too subtle, the sympathies become too 
 exacting and refined, to accept blindly such companionship or 
 compensation as these ties may afi'ord. 
 
 Every woman who has had the power to make herself be- 
 loved has known a height of ecstasy beside which all the rest 
 of life must for ever look pale and dull. You say to a Avoman, 
 ' When your lovers fall away from you, console yourself with 
 your children.' It is as though you said to her, ' As you can no 
 longer have the passion-music of the great oi'chcstras, listen to 
 the little airs of the chamber harmonium.' 
 
 While your lover loves you he is all yours ; you are his sun 
 and moon, his dawn and darkness, his idol, his lawgiver, his 
 ecstasy — what can compensate to you for the loss of that power? 
 Whether time or marriage or other women kill that for you, 
 whenever it goes utterly, you are more beggared than any 
 queen driven from her kingdom naked in winter snow^s, like 
 Elizabeth of Hungary. And it always goes ; always, always ! 
 We reach the height, but we cannot stay at it. We live for a 
 few instants with the stars, then down we drop like stones. 
 
 So she would think at times ; and the presence of Blanche 
 de Laoa had power to recall iind emphasise euch thoughts more
 
 OTHMAR, 131 
 
 irritatinyly tliau liad tliat of any otlicr woman. In a thousand 
 hinted insolences, couched in bland phrase, Blanchette again 
 and again reminded her that ' le jour est aux jeunes.'' 
 
 The day was indeed still her own, but twilight was near. 
 
 It was the Princesse de Laon's fasliion of vengeance — pend- 
 ing any other. 
 
 Blanchette had known very little emotion in her twenty 
 years of existence, hardly any pain except that of some ruffled 
 egotism or some denied caprice. She had been a woman of tho 
 world to her finger tips, from the time of her infancy, when she 
 had been curled and frizzed and dressed in the latest mode to 
 show her small jjerson in the children's balls at Deauville or at 
 Aix ; but when she had heard of the death of her cousin, and 
 realised that she would never hear the voice of Yseulte again on 
 earth, she had known a grief more violent, a regret more sud- 
 den and sincere, than her vain and self-absorbed little life could 
 have been sujjposed capable of in its inflated frivolity and 
 egotism. With her intuitive knowledge of human nature, she 
 had divined the true cause of that death, and into her small 
 cold soul there had entered two sentiments which were not of 
 self : the one an imperishable regret for her cousin, the other 
 an imperishable hatred of Nadine Napraxine. 
 
 Others forgot ; she did not. 
 
 CHAPTER XVITI. 
 
 Amyot was to the great world of the hour what Compi^gne 
 used to be to it in the finest days of the Second Empire. More 
 indeed, for whilst nearly all patrician France would never pass 
 an imperial threshold, there was no one of such eminence in 
 all the nobilities of Europe that he or she did not covet, and 
 feel flattered to obtain, their invitation to those summer and 
 autumnal festivities of the Chateau Othmar. But enraptured 
 as her guests all were, the chatelaine of Amyot remained 
 moderately pleased by what pleased her guests so excessively, 
 and less and less pleased with every year. 
 
 ' After all, there is nothing really new in anything we do 
 here,' she said slightingly to Loris Loswa, who occupied there 
 a half -privileged and half-subordinate position as chief director 
 of the various entertainments ; it was he who brought the greatest 
 actors on the stage, who initiated the greatest singers to direct 
 the concerts, who invented new figures for the cotillions, and 
 who organised the moonlight fetes in the gardens with the do- 
 cility of a courtier and the ready imagination of a clever artist 
 steeped to Jiis fingers' ends in the traditions of the eighteenth 
 century, 
 
 E 2
 
 132 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' Vereschaguin would certainly not be one half so useful in 
 the summer in a French chateau,' said Nadine, with her con- 
 temptuous appreciation of his merits and accomplishments. 
 
 ' Take care that your poodle does not bite one day,' Othroar 
 answered. 'You hurt his vanity very often.' 
 
 'He may bite me for aught I know,' she replied. 'Buc 
 be very sure he will never quarrel with Amyot. He is very 
 prudent in his own self-interest.' 
 
 ' But no man likes to be merely used as you show that you 
 use him.' 
 
 ' I pay him. I have made him the fashion. I can unmake 
 him.' 
 
 Othmar ventured to demur to that. 
 
 ' You can do a great deal in faisant la plnie et le beatt temps, 
 we all know ; but surely the fashion which Loswa has attained 
 (for it is fashion and not fame) is, though a great deal of it may 
 be owing to full artificial support, yet real enough to stand 
 alone. For his own generation, at any rate.' 
 
 ' My dear Otho, nothing is ever easier than to denigrer : 
 Pope has said it before us. It costs an immense quantity of 
 time and trouble to make a reputation, but to unmake it is as 
 easy as to unravel wool. A word will do. If I were to hint 
 that Loswa is a little loud in his colour, a little crude or voidii 
 in his treatment, everyone would begin to find his talent vulgar. 
 I shall not say it, because I shall not think it ; he is an incom- 
 parable artist in his own way ; but he always knows that I can 
 say it, and that knowledge keeps him my slave.' 
 
 Othmar was silent : he did not like Loswa, and was im- 
 patient of his familiarity at Amyot, a familiarity made more 
 offensive to liim by its mixture with flattering docility. That 
 Loswa had a talent so masterly that it was nearly genius he 
 quite admitted, but the quality of the talent was artificial, and 
 seemed to him to represent the moral fibre of the artist's 
 character. 
 
 ' All Russians of a certain class are artificial,' said his wife 
 to him when he said this. ' We are all stove plants — children 
 of a forced culture and an unreal atmosphere. In our natural 
 instincts we are cruel, fierce, fickle, Slav toto corde. In our 
 social relations we are the most polished of all people. As 
 children we bite like little wolves ; grown-up wo know more 
 perfectly than anyone else how to caress our enemies, Los>va 
 is only like us aU.' 
 
 ' The future of the rrorld is with Russia 1 ' 
 
 'I think 80. All the .science of liistory makes one sure of 
 it: but at the present instant we are the oddest union of the 
 most absolute barbarism and the most polished civilisation that 
 the world holds. Society has nothing so perfectly cultured as 
 tlio Jlussian patrician ; Europe has nothing lo barbarously
 
 OTHMAR. 133 
 
 ignorant and besotted as the Russian peasant. '^ Les extremes 
 se touchent " more startlingly in Russia than in any other 
 country, and out of those conflicting elements will come the 
 dominant race of the future, as you say.' 
 
 Othmar looked at her, then said after a pause : ' I have 
 always wondered that you have not cared to become a great 
 jiolitical leader ; all political questions interest you, and nothing 
 else does.' 
 
 ' My dear Otho, I should only be a conspirator if I did ; you 
 would not wish tliat ; it would upset the House of Othmar.' 
 
 'I should like whatever pleased you,' he said, weakly per- 
 haps but sincerely. 
 
 ' Even your own ruin 1 ' she asked, amused. 
 
 ' Even that, perhaps I ' he answered — and thought : * if it 
 served to draw us more closely together.' 
 
 She guessed what remained unspoken. 
 
 ' I do not think ruin would have an agreeable effect on my 
 character,' she said, still with amusement at his romantic 
 fancies. ' I have never at all understood why it should develop 
 all one's virtues to have a bad cook, or why it should render 
 one angelic to be obliged to draw on one's stockin^^s oneself, or 
 brush one's own hair before a cracked glass. I think it would 
 only make me exceedingly unpleasant to everybody, yourself 
 included.' 
 
 ' Marie Antoinette ' 
 
 ' Oh, poor ]\Iarie Antoinette ! She adorns the moral of 
 every lesson of earthly vicissitudes ! I think the very enormity 
 ot her agony served as a stimulant. Besides, she knew she had 
 all posterity for an audience. In great crises it ought to be 
 easy to behave greatly. Antigone and Iphigenia are intelligible 
 to me.' 
 
 ' Because you have instincts v/hich are great in you ; 
 only ' 
 
 ' Only what ? Do not pause. The one privilege of mar- 
 riage which is really valuable, is the permission to say disagree- 
 able things.' 
 
 ' It is a privilege of which the wise do not avail themselves. 
 I was only going to say that I think you would become heroic, 
 were you in heroic circumstances. But the world is always 
 with yo'i aii'i its influences are narcotic or alcoholic, heroic 
 never. 
 
 ' 1 hope I should go to the scaflbld decently, if you mean 
 that, were I sent there. That always seems to me a very easy 
 thing to do. But to be amiable or philosophic if one had no 
 waiting-woman, or no bath, or no change of clothes, seems to 
 me much more diflicult.' 
 
 ' Yet, even then, if you were tried ' 
 
 ' Pray do not, in your anxiety to test my character, go and
 
 T.4 or H MAR. 
 
 ruin my fortune ! Poverty is tolerable in a novel ; but in real 
 life it can only be sordid, tiresome, and vulgar.' 
 
 'Not necessarily vulgar, I assure you if I could have 
 brought the House of Othmar down as Samson did the temple 
 of Dagon, without slaying the Philistines under it, as he did, 1 
 should have done it many years ago. If poverty be vulgar, 
 ■what are riches ? Intolerably vulgar in my estimation.' 
 
 She looked at him with a certain admiration crossed by a 
 certain disdain. 
 
 ' I always thought your contempt for wealth very pic- 
 turesque,' siie replied, ' and it is, I know, quite sincere. At 
 the same time it is a quixotism, and gets you laughed at by 
 those who cannot possibly understand all the refinements of 
 your motives as I do ; to Bleichroeder or Soubeyran you would 
 seem insane. And I do not think you do at all understand one 
 sign of your times ; which is the immense preponderance given 
 by it to mere wealth. Every year adds to the power of the 
 financiers. Already it is they who, in reality, make peace or 
 war : ministers cannot move without them, and without them 
 armies starve. At present their dominion is greatly hidden, 
 and not understood by the people ; but in a little while it is 
 they who will be the open dictators of the world. It will not 
 be precisely a millennium, but, were I you, I should see the 
 picturesque and the ambitious side of it.' 
 
 ' I can only see the absolute corruption and decadence which 
 will be inevitable.' 
 
 ' Because nature meant you to be a poet, writing sonnets to 
 a grasshopper like Meleager, or dying early in the arms of the 
 sea like Shelley ; you have been always out of tune with your 
 own times. It is a kind of anremia, for which there is no 
 cure.' 
 
 ' It is a malady you share ' 
 
 ' Oh no ! We are as far asunder as Jean-qul-rit and Jcfot- 
 qid-pUure. What amuses me as a comedy distresses you as a 
 tragedy : when I see a satire like Pope's you see a dirge like the 
 Dajilmis. The two attitudes are as difierent as a horso chestnut 
 and a chestnut horse.' 
 
 ' At one time we were not so very inharmonious ! ' said 
 Othmar unwisely ; since it is always unwise to recall a bond of 
 sympathy at any moment when that bond seems strained or 
 out-worn. It is natural to do so, but it is unwise. 
 
 ' Wlicn people are amouraches they always imagine them- 
 Belves syiiq)at]ietic to each other on every point,' she said with 
 cruel trutli ; then she jiaused a moment, and, smiling, added a 
 trutli still more cruel. 
 
 ' I should always have sympathised with you, probably, if I 
 had not married you,' ?ho repeated dreamily and amiably. 
 
 'That I quite understand,' said Othmar, with bitterness.
 
 OTHMAR. 135 
 
 ' One can be a hero to one's wife as little as to one's valet. It 
 is not to be hoped for in either case.' 
 
 'I know all about you,' she said with a sigh . 'That is so 
 very fatal ! Perhaps if you would do something I do not know, 
 you would become interesting again.' 
 
 ' That is a suggestion which may have its perils.' 
 
 ' Peril % ' she repeated. ' My dear Otho, there is much more 
 peril in the monotony of undisturbed relations. I often wonder 
 if you are really sincere when you profess such constant admira- 
 tion of me ; myself, I admit I constantly think how unwise we 
 were not to remain delightful illusions to each other. It is 
 impossible to retain any illusions about a person you live with ; 
 if you looked at Chimborazo every day it would seem srinall ! ' 
 
 They were alone for a few rare moments in her owa apart- 
 ments at Amyot ; it was but seldom now that he ever was in- 
 dulged with a conversation soito quattr^ occhi. She held firmly 
 to her theory that too much intimacy is the grave of love, a 
 grave so deep that love has no resurrection. 
 
 Those stupid women who allowed their lovers or their lords 
 to enter their apartments as easily as they could eaater their 
 stables ! — what could they expect I All the charm of admit- 
 tance there was gone. 
 
 His face flushed deeply as he heard her now. 
 
 ' I wonder if you have any conception of what bitterly cruel 
 things you say 1 ' he exclaimed. ' Or are the subjects of your 
 vivisection too infinitesimally small in your eyes for you to 
 remember their possible pain 1 ' 
 
 ' My dear Otho ! I do not think a truth should ever be 
 painful to any candid mind !' she rephed, with a little merciless 
 laugh. ' If a man and woman, who know each other as well as 
 we do, cannot say the truth to one another, who is ever to make 
 any psychological studies at all ? ' 
 
 ' No one does that has any real feeling in him or in her,' 
 said Othmar impatiently. ' All those elaborate examinations 
 under the glass are cold as ice. They are very scientific, no 
 doubt, but there is not a heart throb in them.' 
 
 ' I think the gi'eatest pleasure of strong emotion is the 
 analysis of it,' she replied with perfect truth. 'You are not 
 philosophic, you are poetic. So you do not understand what I 
 mean.' 
 
 'You mean,' said Othmar angrily, 'that when Hero saw 
 Leander's dead body washed up to her arms from the waves, she 
 was amply compensated for his death by the advantage of 
 X^utting her own tears under the spectrum ! ' 
 
 ' That is an exaggerated illustration. But I admit that the 
 mental intricacies of every passion is what is alone interesting 
 in it to me.' 
 
 ' It is why you have never felt passion ! '
 
 136 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' Perhaps ! * 
 
 She smiled and stretched her arms indolently above her 
 head as she hxy back amongst her cushions. 
 
 _'I have always perfectly understood,' she continued, 'that 
 unjustly abused lady of the legend who flung her glove into the 
 lions' den ; she wanted emotions and she had the whole gamut 
 of them no doubt in those few moments— fear, hope, pride, 
 triumph, discomfiture ; she must have known all that it is pos- 
 sible to know of emotion in those three minutes.' 
 
 ' You have often thro\vn your glove.' 
 
 'Do you mean that for a rebuke? Your tone is gloomy. 
 Yes, I have thrown it, but they have always brought it back 
 to me like lap-dogs. There is too much of the lap-dog in men.' 
 
 ' In me ? ' said Othmar with anger. 
 
 ' Yes, in you too. You would go for my glove still.' 
 
 'Yes, T would, God help me.' 
 
 She laughed. ' I am sure you would, at present. I suppose 
 the time will come when you will go for seme other woman's. 
 It is in your nature to do that sort of thing.' 
 
 Othmar was irritated and wounded ; he was tired of this 
 eternal jesting. His fidelity to her was the most real and the 
 most sensitive thing in all his life, andj-et he had the conviction 
 that in her heart she ridiculed him foi it. 
 
 ' Still, I think you of all women would be most intolerant of 
 inconstancy,' he said, speaking almost unconsciously his own 
 thoughts aloud. 
 
 ' I hope I should forgive it Avith my reason, which would 
 understand and so excuse it, though my feminine weaknesses 
 miglit i->crhaps resent it ; one never knows one's own foibles.' 
 
 *It is only indifference which forgives inconstancy.' 
 
 ' Oh— h — h ! I am not sure of that. There may be indul- 
 gence without indiflerence.' 
 
 ' But not without contempt. ' 
 
 'I do not know that. Tout comjorcndre, c'cst tout pavdouner. 
 I have so very slight an opinion of human nature that I do 
 not think I could ever be seriously angry with any of its 
 errors. ' 
 
 ' Then that would be because none of them had power to 
 reach your heart. I do not believe you would care for anyone 
 sufficientlj' ever to be jealous of them.' 
 
 She smiled and rose. 'My dear Otho, jealousy is a very 
 "gly. useless, and unwise passion. The world decided, as soon 
 as ever 1 was presented to it, that I had no such thing as a 
 heart. You have always persisted in supposing that I have, but 
 very likely the world is more right than you.' 
 
 'May I not hope at least that I have a place in it?' mur- 
 mured Othmar, and he bent towardfj her with much of a lover's 
 ardour.
 
 OTHMAR. 137 
 
 But she drew herself away with a toucli of that chiUness by 
 which she had used to freeze the blood in Napraxinc's veins. 
 
 ' My dear Otho,' she said, with her unkind little smile, 
 'really that is a twice-told tale! Do you think after so many 
 years it is worth while to cliantcr des madrifianx 1 You know 
 1 was at no time ever very fond of them. " Laurel is green for 
 a season, and love is sweet for a day ! " Let us be friends, the 
 most charming friends in the world ; that is far more agree- 
 able.' 
 
 Othmar rose from where he had been half kneeling at her 
 feet ; his face was very flushed, and his eyes grew angry ; he 
 was irritably sensible of having made himself absurd in her 
 eyes. 
 
 ' You will not awe me as you used to do that poor humble 
 dead fool,' he said bitterly. ' But if you be tired of me I will 
 summon my fortitude to bear dismissal as best I may.' 
 
 ' Oh ! — tired — no ! ' she said, with a deprecating accent which 
 was marred on his ear by a certain latent thrill beneath it of 
 suppressed laughter. ' Only I think Ave have done with all that. 
 If Mary Stuart had married Chastelard, I am sure he would not 
 have gone on writing sonnets and songs ; at least not writing 
 them to her. We have a quantity of all kinds of interests and 
 objects common to us. Let us be content with those. Believe 
 me, if you will leave oft' the madrigals it will be very much 
 better. You have been the most admirable lover in tlie world, 
 but as you cannot be a lover now, suppose you leave off the 
 language and — and — the nonsense ? llegard me as your best 
 friend : 1 shall ever be that.' 
 
 Othmar coloured witli a confused mingling of emotions. 
 
 ' Friendship ! ' he echoed. ' I did not marry you to be 
 relegated to friondsliip ! ' 
 
 ' Then you were not clairvoyant,' she said, with her un- 
 kindest laugh. 'There are only two results possiljle to any 
 marriage : they are friendship or separation, the door to the left 
 or the door to the right.' 
 
 Then with her prettiest, chilliest laugh she left him, amused 
 by the vexation, oli'ence, and embarrassment which his features 
 expressed. 
 
 ' " Ji faut enfinir avec Ics inadriganx,'" ' she said, as she looked 
 at him over her shoulder and passed down the staircase. 
 
 Othmar was deeply pained and iiotJy angered. He had at 
 all times, even in the earliest hours of their union, bien con- 
 scious that his caresses were rather permitted than enjoyed, his 
 tenderness was rather accepted indulgently than ardently re- 
 turned. There was a total absence of physical passion in lier, 
 which had served to heighten his intellectual admiration of her, 
 if at times it had held his emotions in check, and made him feel 
 that his ardour was boyish, absurd, sensual, romantic. But he
 
 i^S OTHMAR. 
 
 liad never been prepared to accept the position into wliich 
 Napraxine liad been di'ivcn by the indifference of her tempera- 
 ment. He had never anticipated tliat the time might come 
 when he also might be allowed no more than a touch of her 
 cool white fingers, and a careless smile of morning greeting. 
 
 Sooner an open quarrel than such mockery of friendship ! — 
 BO he thought. 
 
 He remained where she had left him, sunk in meditation, 
 which retraced one by one the passages of his love for lier. It 
 had been love so great, so entire, so intense, that it could never 
 change — unless slie or her own will killed it. It had been one 
 of those mighty incantations of which no hand but the sorcerer s 
 own can ever lift off tlie spell. 
 
 As her lover he liad always imagined that she, marble to all 
 others, would be wax to him ; he had always believed that he 
 would light the flame of fervour behind the alabaster-like ice of 
 lier temperament. But he had learned his error. He had found 
 that possession is not necessarily empire. He had discovered 
 that he pleased her intelligence and her vanity rather tlian 
 awakened her senses or her emotions. She had made him 
 mortifyingly conscious that she found him of no higher stature 
 than other men, and had unsparingly reminded him that there 
 Avas no more fatal foe of love than familiarity. 
 
 She had wounded him mora than she had meant more tlian 
 once, and this time the wound penetrared bcith his pride and 
 his affections, and left v/ith him an acrid sense of undeserved 
 humiliation. 
 
 ' No man can have been truer to her than I have been,' he 
 thought, with that pathetic wonder that fidelity does not 
 beget gratitude which is common to all lovers, be they man or 
 woman. 
 
 Was it true that she would not care if his fancy Avandered 
 elsewhere? Would slie not feel any anger were he, like all his 
 friends, to spend his passions and his substance in tlie arms of 
 cocottes, and in providing tlie splendours of their palaces ? 
 AVould she indeed feel no pang if any other woman, whether 
 duchess or drulcsse, were to obtain empire over him ? 
 
 If not, then truly she had never loved him. He felt no 
 impulse to put her to the test : ho only felt a weary and dreary 
 sense of loneliness, of discomfiture, of chagrin, of humiliation. 
 
 He Lad always doubted whether she had ever realised the 
 depth and tlie extent of the passion lie had spent on her. He 
 had always fancied tliat she classed it only with the hot desires 
 and romantic sentiments of men, of which slic had seen so much ; 
 there might be even many of tliose men who appeared to her to 
 have been truer lovers tlian he. He had married her : Avould 
 Helen have over believed that Menelaus could love like Paris ? 
 Surely net. There had been many men whose blood had been
 
 OTIIMAR. 139 
 
 Bpilled like water on the ground for her sake, or from her 
 caprice. It Avas inevitable that there should seem truer lovers 
 than he who dwelt under the same roof as herself, and led the 
 even tenour of his daily life beside her. 
 
 She had been too early saturated and satiated with the 
 spectacle of strong and forbidden passions for the repetition of 
 a well-known and often-laughed-at love to have any power to 
 excite her interest in the tame sameness of a permitted and 
 undisturbed intimacy. He felt that she had spoken the entire 
 ti'uth when she had said that she would have cared for him 
 much more had she never married him. She required endless 
 novelty, incessant renewal of excitation, continual stimulant to 
 her love of mystery, of peril, and of power. There was no food 
 for these in the calm certainty of possession which is the accom- 
 paniment and enemy of all conjugal life, in the tranquil succes- 
 sion of years which resembled one another monotonous as 
 peace. 
 
 Perhaps she had loved him most of all on that day when she 
 had Avritten to him that their paths in life must wend for ever 
 apart. It had been a hon moment, a moment of exaltation, 
 of intensity, of strong interest, stimulated by a sense of self- 
 sacrifice ; a moment in which she had put him voluntarily away 
 from her ; and, so doing, had seen him in a light which had 
 never before or after shone upon him in her eyes. 
 
 The mockery of her slight laughter remained now in jar- 
 ring echo on his ears. What a fool he miist seem to her ! 
 "What a poor, romantic, sensitive, unwise stringer of unwritten 
 madrigals ! 
 
 To endeavour to arouse her jealousy never passed across his 
 thoughts. It seemed to him that she must know so well that 
 she had taken his own heart out of his breast never to return it 
 to him. Othmar was not more chaste than other men of the 
 world ; but his passion for Nadine Napraxine had been of such 
 length of endurance, of such intensity of feeling, had been so 
 environed with the ennobling solemnities of death, and had 
 been so fed on long denial and severance, that it always seemed 
 to him his very life itself. His temperament was too grave for 
 the light loves of the world, and his character too constant and 
 too sincere for those intrigues which form a mere pleasant pas- 
 time without engaging either the afiection or the memory. He 
 was like the Greek who hung his sj^ear, his shield, his sandals, 
 and his flute before the shrine of Aphrodite's self ; and could 
 worship no lesser divinities than she. 
 
 He went out of the house and into the gardens of Amyot, 
 where they were most shadowy and solitary. The late summer 
 roses were filling the air with their fragrance, and the stately 
 peacocks were drawing their trains of purple and gold over the 
 shaded grass. A flock of wild doves sailed overhead ; near at
 
 I JO OTHMAR. 
 
 hand a fountain sent its .silvery column towering in the light, to 
 fall in clouds of spray into the marble basin, where laughing 
 loves rode their white dolphins through green fleets of water- 
 lily leaves. In the distance, beyond tlie clipped walls of bay, 
 his children with some dogs were playing on a lawn under one 
 of the terraces. Their laughter came faintly on the wind ; he 
 could see their shining hair glisten in the sunsliine. He did not 
 go to them. 
 
 The kiss of a child could not soothe the irritated bitterness 
 which was at his heart, the wound which the hand he loved best 
 had given him. 
 
 It was a warm golden day ; the heat lay heavy on all the 
 country of the Orleannais ; and the Loire water, low and still, 
 was broken by wide stretches of sandy soil where the river bed 
 was laid bare. He, Avith a vague depression for which he could 
 not have accounted, felt restless and disposed to solitude. With 
 that kind of impulse towards the relief of melancholy things 
 which that sort of motiveless sadness usually brings with it, he, 
 for the first time for years, turned his steps towards the cham- 
 bers once occupied by his first wife. Nothing had ever been 
 touched in them since the last day that she had been at Amyot : 
 save to keep away the cobwebs and the dust, no servant ever 
 entered there ; the doors were locked, and he himself kept the 
 master ke3^ 
 
 An iijstinct of remembrance, for which he could not have 
 accounted, moved him to enter there this hot and silent noon. 
 He trod tlie floors with a noiseless step, as men move in the 
 chamber where some dead thing lic.<i, and with a noiseless hand 
 undid the fastenings of one of the great windows and let in the 
 light. All tilings were as they had been left that day when she 
 had last gone away from Amyot to her death. The golden sun- 
 beams strayed in on to the Avhite satin coverlet of the bed, the 
 ivory crucifix which hung above it, the frie-dieAi with the Book 
 of Hours oi^en, the roses a mere brown heap of ugliness, withered 
 where she had set them in their bowl. 
 
 He sat down in the midst of the lonely things and felt a 
 sense of regret, of remorse, of wistful compunction and self- 
 reproach. Ever and again at intervals such an emotion had 
 ]>assed over him whenever he had thought of her, but never 
 sliarply enough to cause him such pain as it caused him now, 
 remembering her youtli plucked by death like a snowdrop in its 
 bud. The big dog which had belonged to her had entered un- 
 IHTceived after him, and was looking upward in his face, as if 
 it likewise were moved by sudden and sorrcjwful remembrances. 
 
 Poor child I so little missed, so utterly unmourned ! 
 
 *Et rose, die a vccu ce que vivent Ics roses : 
 L'espace d'un malin.'
 
 OTHMAR. IA\ 
 
 Friedrich Othniar had had tlicsc two lines carved upon her 
 tomb ; they told of all the brevity of hei* life, hut not of all its 
 sadness. Had any living creature ever guessed all that? 
 
 A chill passed over Othmar as the doubts came to him. Had 
 she suffered much more than he had ever thought ? He had 
 been caught then on the strong cyclone of a great passion, and 
 been blinded by its rush and force. 
 
 The silence of the large chamber seemed filled with one 
 long sigh. 
 
 The dog looked at him always, as though saying : ' I have 
 not forgotten : once she lived ; where is she now '\ ' 
 
 Ah, where ! 
 
 He rose oppressed by new and painful thoughts, and moved 
 from one object to another in the room, as though each of them 
 would tell Iiim something he had yet to learn. He touched 
 Avith a reverent hand this thing and that which had lielonged 
 to her, and which survived unharmed, unworn, and would so 
 last for centuries if his descendants spared them ; frail toys and 
 trifles, yet dowered with a power of endurance denied to the 
 human life, which there had passed away like a cloud of the 
 morning. 
 
 He took up her ivory tablets with the engagements of the 
 day still written in pencil on them ; he touched her long thin 
 gloves, her tall tortoiseshcll-ti})ped garden cane, her writing- 
 case with its monogram in silver. The things moved his heart 
 strongly for the first time in seven years : it had been no fault 
 of hers that she had been powerless to gain love from him. 
 
 One by one he drew oj)en the drawers of the buhl-table on 
 which these, her writing things, had all been left unmoved : in 
 one he saw a little book covered with vellum, and closed with a 
 silver pencil as a gate is closed with a stajile. He hesitated a 
 moment ; then he drew the pencil out and opened the book. 
 It was half filled with tliose poor timid little verses of which 
 Nadine Napraxine had once by a chance jest suggested the 
 existence, and for which the child hael blushed as for a sin. 
 They were faint, blurred, often half effaced, purposelessly, as by 
 a shy uncertain hand afraid of its own creations, but some were 
 legible. He read them, and all the soul left in them spoke to 
 his. 
 
 All the thoughts and fears and sorrows, all the longing and 
 the doubt and the hesitation which she had been too timid and 
 too proud to ever show in life, were spoken to him in those 
 tender and imperfect poems. They were simple as a daisy, 
 spontaneous as a wood-lark's song ; they were ignorant of all 
 laws of science or rules of spondee and of dactyl ; but, all halt- 
 ing and shy though they were, they had all the truth of a human 
 heart in them. They were deep and wide enough to hold the 
 secret which she hud shut in them.
 
 142 OTIIMAR 
 
 As he read them a iiiif^t came before his eyes, and a sigh 
 escaped him. He understood all that she had snfFercd heio 
 beneath this roof -where he had promised her a life of joy. He 
 saw all that she had hidden from him so cavofiilly, through pride 
 and shyness and tlie cruel humiliation of a hjve which knew 
 itself powerless to awake response, of a soul which suffered in 
 its innocence all the tortures of the damned. He had lived 
 beside her seeing naught of that piteous conflict ; parted from 
 her by the Avail built up out of his own indifference and coldness. 
 
 Had he even tlien been able to discern it, it would not have 
 touched him, because of all chill things on earth the chillest is 
 the heart of a man towards a love which he does not desire, 
 which he cannot return. But it reached and touched him now. 
 
 The voice from the grave could not fret him as the voice of 
 the living might have done, had he heard it in that pitiful cry 
 of utter loneliness. 
 
 Poor timid little verses like nestling birds shivering in the 
 chill winds and pallid sunshine of an unkind spring — across the 
 yeai's they brought her heart to his. 
 
 And though he had never loved her, yet in that moment of 
 remorse he would have given all that he possessed, all the lives 
 around him, and all the peace of his own soul, to be able, once 
 to call her back to earth, and once to say to her, ' Child, for- 
 give me.' 
 
 But she was dead. 
 
 He sat there long in solitude, tlie dog lying mute at his feet. 
 
 He had read the broken, unfinished, humble little verses till 
 their words were in his ear and before his eyes, and in all the 
 sunbeams straying through the golden dust of the air around. 
 
 When he rose he laid them gently back where they had been 
 left, with such a touch as a man gives to flowers wdiich he lays 
 on the dead limbs of some dear lost creature. Then he closed 
 the window and went out of the chamber, the dog following 
 him, -with slow unwilling footsteps. 
 
 There went with him a remorse which would never leave 
 him. For the first time the sense had come iipon him that her 
 death had been self-sought, in that sunset hour of the month 
 of hyacinths, when her body had dropped as a stone drops 
 down through the bird-haunted air. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 He felt an irresistible impiilse to seek out the woman he loved, 
 to unburden his heart to her of this ncAV thought which seemed 
 to him like a crime. He had left her in anger and mortification, 
 but it was to her that he turned instinctively under the pain of
 
 or II MAR. 143 
 
 a discovery which had hlled him with a sense of intolerable 
 remorse. 
 
 Alas ! they were not alone ; the great house was full of 
 guests. With the slanting of the afternoon shadows across the 
 hoary face of the old sun-dial, on which were the monogram of 
 Fran^'ois de Valois and his sister, these indolent people had all 
 left their chambers and were now scattered in quest of diversion 
 all over the house, the gardens, or the woods, riding, driving, 
 making music, or making love, carrying on their banter, their 
 friendships, their rivalries, their intrigues. To see her as he 
 wished, alone, was impossible for many hours. After sunset 
 there -was the long and ceremonious dinner ; after dinner there 
 was the usual evening pastime, some chamber music by great 
 artists, some dancing for those who wished it, whist and bacca- 
 rat in the card-room, flirtation in the drawing-rooms, constant 
 demands, which he could not resist, made upon his own courtesy 
 and social powers. 
 
 ' What a stupid life ! ' he thought impatiently, being out of 
 tune with its lightness and gaiety. ' What a stupid bondage ! 
 The vine-dressers sound asleep in their cave-cabins above the 
 Loire w^ater are a thousand times wiser than Ave are ! ' 
 
 He looked at his wife often. She had professed to think her 
 world tiresome and its monotony of pleasure tedious ; she had 
 professed to find its conventional routine mere treadmill work 
 which no one had the courage to refuse to pursue, but which 
 every one of its toilers hated ; and yet she never spent a day 
 otherwise than in this conventional world ! — she never ceased 
 for an hour to surround herself with its artificialities and its 
 pageantries. If she had really wished to escape from it how 
 easy to have done so ! — how easy to have chosen instead some 
 solitary and tranquil spot with him and with her children ! 
 
 But they were all as the very breath of her existence, this 
 air of the great world, this perpetual movement and excitation, 
 these elegant crowds, these honey-tongued courtiers, this Babel 
 of news, and novelties, and fashion, and emmi, and endless 
 eflort to be amused ! Were she alone with him at Amyut, 
 would she not yawn with ennui every hour of the twenty-four 1 
 She had said that she would. 
 
 He left the brilliant rooms as soon as his duties as a host 
 permitted him to escape, and wandered through the dusky aisles 
 and avenues of his gardens. 
 
 The night was still and sultry ; the sounds of music and the 
 reflection of the lights within came from the many open case- 
 ments of the great castle on to the terraces and lawns beneath. 
 There w^as no moon : the steep roof, the pointed towers, the 
 frowning keep of Amyot stood up black and massive against 
 the starry sky. Restless, and tormented by his thoughts, its 
 master paced the dark grass alleys of its gardens ; all the simple
 
 144 OTHMAR. 
 
 verses of tlie little niamiscript poems seemed whispered from 
 their leaves and murmured by the fountains. 
 
 ' She loved me ! ' he thought again and again. And to that 
 warm and tender heart his own had been so cold ! 
 
 It Iiad been no fault of his ; no man can love because he 
 will ; and still 
 
 He stayed out in the gardens until the lights had ceased to 
 shine in the great windows, and in the distant country lying 
 beyond the forest belt of Amyot the call to vespers was ringing 
 through the darkling daybreak from village tower and spire, 
 waking the slumbering peasants to their toil amidst the vines 
 or on the river. 
 
 Then he entered the house and went to his wife's apart- 
 ments. 
 
 When her woman asked if she would receive him she smiled 
 a little. He was like a repentant child, she thought, sorry that 
 he had been ill-treated and tired of pouting ! 
 
 ' I am half asleep ! ' she said as he entered. ' Why do you 
 come and disturb me % Where have you been all the evening l 
 You look as if you had seen the ghosts of all the tellers of the 
 tales of the Heptameron ! ' 
 
 She laughed a little as she spoke ; she had put on a loose 
 gown of soft white tissues, her hair was unbound ; her feet 
 were bare and slipped in Persian shoes sewn thick with pearls. 
 She was lying back amongst the pale rose-coloured cusliions of 
 her couch in the hot night ; her arms were uncovered to the 
 shoulders ; the light was mellow and tempered ; the window 
 stood open ; a slight breeze stirred the air and the gauze 
 of her gown ; her eyes surveyed him with a smile of languid 
 amusement. 
 
 ^ Pauvre enfavt! a-t-il assez hoxidc!^ she thought with an 
 indulgent derision. 
 
 Otiimar, for the first time in his life, was insensible of the 
 seduction of her presence. She observed his preocupation with 
 some offence. It was a slight to herself. 
 
 'What is the matter?' she said impatiently. ' When I am 
 dying to he alone and asleep, do you come to tell me that the 
 ll()tli.«childs will not join you in some loan, or that war is going 
 to begin before the fii)ancicrs wisli for it ? Surely, your bad 
 news would have kept till to-morrow morning? (^hi'oforons 
 done, 'i ' 
 
 Otlimar winced under the irritability and lightness of the 
 words. 
 
 ' Nadege,' he said very low, ' did ever you think that it av."s 
 possible that — that — she sought her own death % ' 
 
 His voice faltered, and had a sound of repressed tears in it. 
 
 She looked at him in astonishment and silence. She did 
 n'jt ask him whom he meant. 
 
 &
 
 OTHMAR. 145 
 
 * Sometimes,' she answered at length, in a hushed voice, 
 with a certain sense of awe. ' Sometimes — yes^I have tliought 
 so. Yes, since you ask me.' 
 
 His head drooped upon his chest ; he sighed heavily. She 
 looked at him with compassion and surprise. 
 
 ' Is it possible,' she tliought, ' that he never had any sus 
 picion of it ? Men are moles ! ' 
 
 Aloud, she said gently : 
 
 ' What makes you think of it now ? What can have 
 happened % ' 
 
 He did not reply for some moments. Then he answered 
 unsteadily : 
 
 ' I went into those locked rooms ; there were some verses in 
 a drawer — some little poems. I do not knoAvwhy ; all at once 
 the impression came to me ; I had never dreamed of it before.' 
 
 ' Men are always so blind ! ' she thought, as she replied 
 aloud : 
 
 ' My dear Otho, we cannot know ; why let as imagine the 
 worst ] It might very well be a mere accident. The woman 
 Nicolle has said how often she had warned her of the dangers 
 of that ruined roof. Do not take that burden of great useless 
 remorse upon your life. It will make you wretched.' 
 
 ' Not more wretched than she was. Not more than I 
 deserve. I was a brute to her.' 
 
 ' That is nonsense ; you could not be brutal to anybody if 
 you tried. You were indifierent, but that was not your fault. 
 She did not know how to make you otherwise. Tliere are 
 women who never know ' 
 
 ' But she deserved so happy a fate ! ' 
 
 * Ai'e there any happy fates ? It is a mere expression. The 
 happy people are the conventional terre, a terre unemotional 
 creatures who pass their lives between two bolsters, one Custom 
 and the other Prejudice. These two bolsters save them from 
 all shocks, and they slumber and grow fat. That poor child 
 might have been happiest in the cloisters, because she would 
 not have known all she missed. But in the wurld she would 
 cei'tainly have been unhappy, wliethi^r with you or any other, 
 because she demanded impossibilities, and because she had no 
 knowledge of human nature.' 
 
 Othmar did not hear what she said. 
 
 'I shall always feel that I have been her murderer,' he said 
 in a hushed voice. Those poor little verses haunted him like 
 the memory of dead children long unmourned and suddenly 
 remembered. 
 
 She looked at him with some impatience rising in her. 
 
 ' How like a man ! ' she thought. ' How exactly like a 
 man — to have killed a woman with his indiiierence and never 
 to have perceived that lie killed her, and then sudde/aly, six or
 
 146 OTHMAR. 
 
 seven years afterwards, to become alive to it as a fact, aud then 
 to sufier indescribable tortures ! A woman would have known 
 at once, but probably would never have blamed herself for it. 
 We have so much more intuition and so much less conscience.' 
 
 She was sorry for tlio pain she saw in him, but she was 
 impatient at once of his slowness of perception and of the 
 strength of his tardy emotions. 
 
 ' Will she be like Banquo's Ghost between us?' she thought, 
 with a vague jealousy of those memories suddenly arisen. 
 
 'My dear Otho,' she said aloud, Avith a little disdain in her 
 sympathy, 'I understand all that you feel, because this cruel 
 fancy has presented itself quite suddenly to you. But I do not 
 think that you ouglit to dwell on it, since you can know nothing 
 for certain. You have been always too much in love Avith ima- 
 ginary sorrows ; you have always been too apt to make for your- 
 self calamities which destiny was willing to spare you. Do not 
 make such a mistake now. Be man enough to face the truth 
 as it stands, which is, that had that poor child lived, she would 
 have grown more and more intolerable to you with every breath 
 she drew. Men enjoy sophisms, and they hate looking at their 
 own motives in all their nakedness. If she had lived you would 
 have made her utterly miserable, through no fault either of 
 yours or hers, but simply from the fault of marriage, which 
 yokes two uncongenial lives together, and refuses to release 
 them for mental and moral disparities which inflict a million 
 times more misery than do the mere gross offences for Avhich 
 the law does grant release.' 
 
 ' I have no doubt you are quite right, but I cannot follow 
 your reasoning,' said Othmar Avith some bitterness. ' I can 
 only feel that I have slain a better life than my own.' 
 
 ' You Avere always so exaggerated in your expressions,' she 
 said with the tone Avhich he himself had so seldom heard from 
 her. ' You have always, as I say, been like the German poets 
 of the last century, perpetually in love with sorroAV ; I suppose 
 because you can fasliion her at your pleasure. Those to Avhom 
 she comes uninvited dislike the look of her, and Avould shut her 
 out if they could.' 
 
 Othmar rose impatient and Avounded. 
 
 ' I should have hoped you Avould have had more sympathy,' 
 he said as he left tlie room. 
 
 Slie gave a little gesture of Avratli as the clour closed behind 
 liim. 
 
 ' Do men ever knoAv Avhat tliey Avish ? ' she said to herself. 
 * If he could bring that poor child to life again he would do it, 
 for tlie moment, and spend the remainder of his life in repent- 
 ing tliat lie had ever done so. If the poAveri of men Avere e(jual 
 in force to the momentary Hashes of thoir consciences, what 
 strange things the Avorld Avowld see ! '
 
 OTHMAR. 147 
 
 She herself Avas conscious that she had answered him with 
 less fcchng, with less sjaiipathy than he might well have looked 
 for from her, but the momentary sense of offence with which 
 she had heard him speak had been too strong to allow her 
 gentler instincts to prevail with her. She was irritated, amazed, 
 profoundly ofiended, and amazed with such grand vanity of 
 amazement as Cleopatra might have felt had some memory of 
 poor pale Octavia risen up betwixt her lover and herself. 
 
 He meanwhile went through the hushed dim corridors of 
 the house with a pang the more at his heai't. He had spoken 
 in a moment of strong feeling, of freshly-awakened pain, and 
 tlie coldness with which his confidence had been received, left 
 its own frost upon his soul. He did not remember that which 
 every man finds ; that no sorrow for one woman will ever 
 awaken sympathy in the breast of another. Shame, suffering, 
 wounds of the world's scorn or fortune's cruelties will make all 
 Avomen compassionate and tender ; but when a man sighs for a 
 woman lost, he will meet with no pity from those women whom 
 he loves. He did not think of that ; he only felt a bruised and 
 baffled sense of utter loneliness ; a momentary w^eakness like 
 that of a child who, being hurt, creeps up to arms it loves only 
 to be repulsed from them. That weary sense of hopelessness 
 which her lovers had so often felt before her came to him ; such 
 liopelessness as may come over the soul of one who, standing 
 shipwrecked on some barren shoi'e, is fronted by some steep, 
 straight, inaccessible Avail of marble cliff, upon whose smooth 
 Avhitc breast there is no place for any aching foot to rest or any 
 hand to close : a Avhite Avail shining in the sun Avhich sees men 
 drown and die. 
 
 Some lines of SAvinburne's earliest and greatest years came 
 back in vaguely remembered fragments to his mind. 
 
 Yea, though we sung as angels in her ear, 
 
 She would not hear. 
 Let us rise up and part ; she Avill not knoAV, 
 Let us go seaward as the great Avinds go. 
 Full of bloAvn sand and foam : Avhathelp is here? 
 There is no help, for all these things arc so, 
 And all the world as bitter as a tear, 
 And how these things are, though I strove to show, 
 She Avould not knoAv. 
 
 And though she saw all heaven in flower above. 
 She Avould not love. 
 ....... 
 
 Let us give up, go down ; she Avill not care, 
 'I'hough all the stars made gold of all the air, 
 Thou.uh all these Avaves Avent over us and droA'e 
 Deep doAvu the stifling lips and glowing hair, 
 yhe v/ould not care. 
 
 t 2
 
 I4S OTHMAR. 
 
 Let us go home and hence ; she will not weep, 
 We gave love many dreams and days to keep, 
 
 • • • • • • a 
 
 All is reaped now, no grass is left to mow, 
 And we that sowed, though all we fell on sleep. 
 She would not weep. 
 
 The verses came back to liis memory as he went away from 
 her chamber to his lonely couch ; and he found in them that 
 curious solace which poetry gives to pain when it echoes pain 
 closely ; that consolation of sympathy, which makes of poets 
 the ministers and the angels of life. The dull, resigned aban- 
 donment which was in these lines was in his own soul. It was 
 no more fierce grief or wild despair, or the delirious rebellion of 
 the lover against his mistress's indift'erence ; it was the apathetic 
 acquiescence of a nature powerless to awake and sway another, 
 the weary and resigned acceptance of a thing unchangeable. 
 
 Nay, and though all men living had pity on me, 
 She would not see ! 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 It was a warm and beautiful night a year later, in full mid- 
 summer in Paris. 
 
 Othmar was alone there, being detained there by the illness 
 of his uncle, who had been stridden three weeks before with 
 hemiplegia, as he had sat at dinner in his own house in the Rue 
 du Traktir, and had ever since lain insensible and paralysed, in 
 a semblance of that death which in all its verity and tyranny of 
 annihilation might come to him at any hour. 
 
 It was a dreary and melanclioly waiting for an end which 
 was inevitable, which no science or eilbrt could avert. He had 
 come out in the coolness of the night, glad, after the closeness 
 of a sick-room, of a little air, a little exercise. His wife was 
 making a series of visits at various great houses throughout the 
 north-east of Europe ; the children were on tlie shores of the 
 Norman coast with their separate household ; Paris was a desert, 
 though both men and women were found there wlio seized the 
 occasion to press on him their presence and their friendship with 
 that assiduity Avhich the Avorld always shows to its very rich 
 men. But he had felt no taste at such a moment for the society 
 of either, and had repulsed both with impatience and scant 
 courtesy. 
 
 The world of pleasure never found Othmar pliant to it ; he 
 disliked and despised it ; he was intolerant alike of its frivolity 
 and of its coarseness ; its enormous expenditure seemed to him 
 grotesquely disproportioned to its poor results in amusement ; 
 and the mere jargon of its habitual speech was unpleasant to
 
 OTHMAR. 149 
 
 him. He was rarely seen at a club, never at a racecourse, and 
 the laugliter of a suppev-table left hiui unmoved to mirth, as 
 the limbs of a dancer left him untouched by admiration. 
 
 Crossing the bridge of Solferino now, he paused to look at 
 the river in the moonlight. There Avas neither Avind nor cloud, 
 and the sky was brilliant with stars ; the Seine seemed a sheet 
 of silver. It was past midnight ; the city on the r/rc gaxiclic was 
 dusky and silent, the other city was studded witli a million 
 points of artificial light ; the ceaseless hum of movement had 
 not ceased there. The air was warm ; the water looked cool 
 and full of repose ; the rays of the full moon, which shone 
 down from the zenith, played in the ripples of it, and its mute 
 highway seemed for tlie moment a silver path into some magic 
 land. 
 
 He leaned against the parapet, and looked down its westward 
 course : he knew every inch of its way ; he knew all the quiet 
 poplar-shadowed hamlets, all the flowering-gi-ass meadows, all 
 the sleepy quiet ancient little towns which were on either side 
 of the historic stream ; he knew how the apple and the cherry 
 orchards sloped to tlie water, how the lilies and flags grew about 
 the washing-places and the landing-stairs, how the white-capped 
 children, knee-deep in cowslii^is, stood still to see the boats go 
 by, how the water flowed through the plaisant pays de France 
 until it grew black and sullied in the smoke of Rouen, and 
 washed itself white again plunging joyously into the snow- 
 flecked sea by Honfleur. 
 
 It was all hidden now, nothing of any of it seen except a 
 broad band of silver spreading away into the darkness ; but the 
 eyes of his mind followed it and illumined its way, and in fancy 
 his nostrils smelt the fragrance of the sweet dew-wet fields, and 
 the breath of the sleeping cows, and the scent of the wild flowers 
 growing where Corneille and Flaubert had died. By day it was 
 but a busy water highway, crowded with sail and dulled with 
 steam, serving to bind city and seaport together ; but by night 
 it Avas transfigured, and all the sighing sounds which came up 
 from it seemed only like the peaceful breathing of the slum- 
 bering children in the many little wooded hamlets down its 
 shores. 
 
 'And Flaubert lived above that water,' thought Othmar 
 dreamily, 'and from his great window saw through his green 
 poplar boughs on to it at sunrise and at sunset, and in the light 
 of the moon like this, and yet he could get nothing of its 
 serenity, and could hear none of its songs, but must vex his 
 soul over the sordid troubles of " Bouvard et Pecuchet." The 
 Seine ought to have been to him a Muse with hands full of 
 meadow-sweet and lips vocal Avith tender folk-songs. If he had 
 had more genius it Avould have been so. The village has its 
 Mine. Bovary, no doubt, under its low red roof covered up Avith
 
 ISO OTHMAR. 
 
 applc-bouglis ; but tlie village has also its Dorothea — if one te 
 Goethe and not Flaubert.' 
 
 The idle thoughts passed dreamily through his brain as he 
 leaned over the coping of the bridge. He had stood there so 
 long and so aimlessly that one of the street-guards came up to 
 him with suspicion, but recognising him, went onward, leaving 
 him undisturbed. 
 
 ' If I were that archimillionnaire,^ thought the man, ' it 
 would be the inside of Bignon's that would have me at this 
 hour, and not the outside of a bridge.' 
 
 That the man who can command all indulgence of the appe- 
 tites may not care to so indulge them, always seems to the man 
 who cannot command such indulgence the most inexplicable of 
 mysteries. The poor man drinks all day long when he has a 
 chance ; he wonders why does the rich man only take a few 
 glasses of claret when he could be drunk the whole year if he 
 chose ? 
 
 Othmar, unwitting of the guard's commentary, continued to 
 gaze down the river, repeating in his thoughts the Greek of 
 Bion's sonnet to HesiDerus, He was wishing vaguely that he 
 had had the gift of poetical expression ; he knew that he thought 
 as poets think, but nature had denied him the power of giving 
 metrical utterance to them. He would sooner, he believed, on 
 such moonlit nights as these, have been able to express what he 
 felt, to portray what he fancied, than have had all the millions 
 which fate had allotted to him. Even a second-rate poet can 
 have such happiness in the fancies he plays with and the figures 
 in which he shapes them on the empty paper. Othmar, from 
 his earliest boyhood, had been haunted with all those imaginings 
 which make the heaven of tliose who can lose themselves in 
 them, and find complete clothing of eloquence for them. But 
 they remained mute within him ; they were rather painful than 
 consoling to him ; when he recalled passages of Shelley, of 
 Musset, of Heine, of Leopardi, it seemed to him that the tongue 
 in Avhich they spoke was so familiar to him that it should have 
 been his own, and yet he had forgotten it or could not learn it, 
 in some way could never make it his. 
 
 ' You are a poete manqne. What a misfortune ! ' his wife had 
 said to him very often with good-humoured derision. But he 
 himself knew that if he had had the poet's faculty of I'hythmical 
 expression tliere would have been no force of circumstances 
 which could have killed it in him. Why he loved music with 
 so strong a passion was, that in it all he would fain have said 
 was said for him. 
 
 ' If I were going home now, he thought, ' to some dark old 
 garret in some crowded cite dcs ^;airy7-es, and yet could write a 
 ballad of the Seine on a summer night, so that all the world 
 ehould listen '
 
 OTHMAR. 151 
 
 It seemed to him that it would be infinitely more like hap- 
 piness than to lend to kings, and baffle ministers, and strengthen 
 cabinets, and give the sinews of war to nations, as he was able 
 to do in that great white pile over in tlie town on the right, 
 which was known to all Paris as the Maison d'Othmar. And 
 yet what beautiful poems the Avorld already possessed, and how 
 seldom it cared to think of one of them ! 
 
 Some bright-cj'ed scholar, some dreaming maiden, some 
 sighing lover : was not this the sole public of the great snigers, 
 whose songs, bound in pomp and pride, lay unopened on the 
 shelves of so many libraries { 
 
 ' And a second-rate singer,' thought Othmar. ' No, I would 
 never have been that. The world, as it is, is cursed and suttb- 
 cated with teeming mediocrity. If one cannot do greatly, let 
 one do nothing.' 
 
 He turned with a sigh from the spectacle of the cloudless 
 shining skies and of the windless shining waters, and went on 
 his way over tlie bridge to return to his house in the Faubourg 
 St. Germain. The clocks of Paris were striking the half -hour 
 after twelve. 
 
 As he took out his cigar-case and lighted a fusee, a woman, 
 held by the same guard who had lately passed him, was dragged 
 by. She was silent and white witli terror, but as she Avent she 
 put out her hand to him in supplication. It seemed to him that 
 he heard some faint bewildered words of appeal too low to be 
 distinct. He threw his cigar aside, and followed and overtook 
 thera in three steps. 
 
 ' "What ai-e you doing?' he asked the guardian of the 
 streets. * What is she guilty of % Touch her more gently at the 
 least.' 
 
 To a man of his habits and temperaments, roughness to any 
 woman seemed a horrible unmanliness and offence. At the 
 sound of his voice the face of the captive was turned to him 
 quickly, and the light of one of the bridge lamps fell full upon 
 it. Her lips parted to speak, but her breathing was fast and 
 oppressed, and her voice failed her. Yet he recognised her in 
 unspeakable amaze. 
 
 'Damaris Be'rarde!' he exclaimed involuntarily. 'Good 
 heavens ! What has happened to you % My poor child ' 
 
 'I do not know why the guard has taken me,' she said 
 feebly. She put her hand to her forehead and staggered a little, 
 as if from faintness. 
 
 She did not understand why they had arrested her, and of 
 ■what she was suspected. It was the old story which meets all 
 hapless, lone young creatures who are in the streets after dark. 
 The man had thought that he did his duty ; she belonged to a 
 sad sistex-hood, and had no legal warrant, so he had believed. 
 To her the charge had been unintelligible ; she had only known
 
 152 OTHMAR. 
 
 that tliey were taking her to the nearest commissary of police, 
 aocused of some unknown crime. 
 
 'Let her go at once,' said Othmar to the guard. 'I know 
 her : I will be responsible for her. Good God, do you not see 
 that she is ill ? ' 
 
 ' If Count Othmar know her ' said the man with a 
 
 dubious smile, unwillingly taking his hand from his victim. 
 Losing that support she Avavered a moment like a young tree 
 that is cut to the root, and then fell in a heap upon the stones 
 of the bridge. 
 
 ' You have killed her ! ' said Othmar as he stooped to her. 
 ' A country child in the brutality of Paris ! ' 
 
 ' She is not ill : she wants food ; that is all,' replied the 
 police officer, assisting him with the respect which he felt for 
 liis riches. 
 
 ' They always fall like stones in that way when they are 
 hungry,' he added. 'I am sorry, sir, but how was I to know? 
 She was a stranger, and she had no permit.' 
 'Call Si fiacre,'' said Othmar. 
 
 Although past midnight, a little crowd had gathered, and 
 was fast assembling with that passion for novelty which is as 
 strong in Paris as it was in Alkibiades' Athens. Most of them 
 knew Othmar by sight. 
 
 ' To the hospital 1 ' asked the driver of the cab which ap- 
 proached. 
 
 'No, to my house,' answered Othmar, 'the Boulevard St. 
 Germain.' 
 
 He lifted her in himself, threw his card to the guard, and 
 drove over the bridge with the girl's inanimate form beside 
 him. 
 
 The crowd laughed a little, cut some coarse jokes, and dis- 
 persed. It was a tame ending to its expectations. It would 
 have preferred an assassination, or at least a suicide. The 
 guard, sullen and aggrieved, carried Othmar's card and his own 
 deposiciciU to tlic nearest commissary. He knew that he would 
 be censured, but whether for taking her up, or for letting her 
 go, he was not certain. 
 
 IMeantime, the vehicle rocked and jolted on over the asphalte 
 till it reached the patrician quarter. Damaris remained insen- 
 sible, but her heart beat, though slowly and faintly. 
 
 He looked at her with curiosity and compassion. It was 
 certainly she ; the granddaughter of .Jean Berarde, the be- 
 trothed of Gros Louis ; the same child that he himself had 
 taken over the moonlit sea to her fragrant island. "White as 
 she was, and thin, and altered by evident sudering, she Avas still 
 too young to be much changed. Her features were the same, 
 though they were pallid and drawn, and in place of the brilliant 
 colours born from thu sea winds and the southerly suns, thuy
 
 OTHMAR. 153 
 
 had the dull pallor which comes from want of food and want of 
 air. Her clothes were the same dark serge that she had worn 
 at Bonaventure, but they were discoloured and ragged. Her 
 hair had lost its lustre, and was rough and tangled ; her hands 
 were scarce more than bone ; her bosom was scarce more than 
 slcin ; all the lovelj' rounded contours and curves of a rich and 
 well-nourished j-outh were gone. He saw that the guard had 
 been right : she had no doubt fainted from hunger. 
 
 But how had she come adrift in Paris % she, the heiress of 
 Bonaventure, so safe and so sheltered under the orange-boughs 
 of her island ? 
 
 Had that single drop of the wine of ' the world ' which his 
 •wife had poured into her innocent breast been so developed in 
 remembrance and solitude that its consuming fever had left her 
 no peace until she had plunged into the furnace and sunk 
 beneath its flames % Heavens ! how easy it was to influence to 
 evil, how hard to sway to any better thing ! 
 
 He looked at her with a comjiassion so tender and solemn that 
 it left no place in him for any other feeling. She had no sex 
 for him ; she was only one of the world's innumerable victims, 
 swallowed up in the vast self-made shell which men call a city. 
 To him, always surrounded by every luxury and comfort, there 
 was something frightful in the thought that a young female 
 thing could actually want bread in the very heart of crowded 
 thoroughfares and human multitudes. 
 
 ' The very wolves are better than men and women,' he 
 thought. ' The w^olves at least always suffer together, and make 
 their hunger a bond of closer union.' 
 
 He did not touch her ; he shrank as far away from her as 
 the space of the hired vehicle allowed him to do. It seemed to 
 him a sort of violation to gaze at her thus in her helplessness, 
 her poverty, her unconsciousness. She was as sacred to him as 
 though she had been dead. 
 
 When the cab passed before the great gilded gates of his 
 own residence, and the night porter opened them with wonder, 
 Otlimar descended, and paused, hesitating for a moment. He 
 was in doubt what it would be best for her that he sliould do. 
 Then he lifted her out of the fiacre himself, and crossed the 
 court, bearing her in his arms. 
 
 ' Send for a doctor and awake some of the women,' he said 
 to the concierge as he paused at the foot of the staircase. 
 
 The lights were burning low. All such of the household as 
 remained in Paris were in bed or out ; the only person up, be- 
 side the porter, was his own body-servant, who, hearing his 
 master's step, came down the stairs to meet him. With a few 
 WM)rds of explanation to this man Othmar, assisted by him, 
 carried the girl into his own library, and laid her down on one 
 of the broad leather couches. Tlien he took some cognac from
 
 154 OTHMAR. 
 
 a liqueur-case ivhicli was in one of the cabinets, and forced a 
 few drops of it through her teeth. 
 
 In a few minutes the head women of the house, hastily- 
 roused, had hurried to his summons. He gave them a few- 
 directions, and left her to their care. 
 
 ' When she is sensible, j^ou will tell me,' he said to them, 
 and went into an inner room. He was still pursued by that 
 sense as of doing her some wrong, some dishonour, if he looked 
 long at her in her unconsciousness. 
 
 The servants obeyed him without venturing on any question 
 or comment, even among themselves. They were accustomed 
 to strange things which their master did, and knew that human 
 misery was title enough t(j his pity. AVhen the p]iy?ician joined 
 them, he said at once what the guard of the streets had said : 
 she was senseless from want of food. 
 
 ' By my examination of her,' he added to Othmar, 'I am 
 inclined to believe that no food has entered her body for 
 twenty-four hours or more.' 
 
 ' Good God ! How hideous ! ' said Othmar. 
 
 It seemed to him as if it were some crime of his own. 
 Not a crust of bread in all Paris to nourish this child % In 
 Paris, where epicures spent a thousand francs on a single dish 
 of Chinese soup, or Paissian fish, or honey-fed Sicilian ortolans ! 
 
 The sharp contrast of wealth and of Avant jarred on him 
 with a dissonant harsli clangour. A child could die from want 
 of a mouthful of food in a city teeming with human life — and 
 Christianity had been the professed creed of Europe well-nigh 
 two tliousand years ! 
 
 ' It is hideous ! ' he repeated ; while a profound emotion 
 consumed him and oppressed his utterance. 
 
 The pliysician looked at him in surprise at his agitation. 
 
 ' You know her ? ' he asked. 
 
 Othmar hesitated ; then he told the little that he did know. 
 _ 'A year and a half ago,' he added, 'she was the boldest, 
 In-ightest, happiest of young girls ; the only heiress of a rich 
 old man.' 
 
 ' ]\Iany things may happen in a year and a half,' said tho 
 physician. ' V/ere I you, I would send her now to tlie Liidies 
 of Calvary ; their refuge is open day and night to any such case 
 as hers.' 
 
 'So is my house,' said Othmar coldlj'. Turn her out at 
 such an hour as tliis ! He Avould not have turned out a dog 
 that had trusted and followed liim. 
 
 ' He is always eccentric,' thought the man of medicine, 
 ' and I dare say he goes for something in her misfortunes ; he is 
 confused and agitated.' 
 
 Aloud he sa;d that he placed himself wholly at the disposi- 
 tion of Count Othmar. There was no immediate danger for
 
 OTHMAR. 155 
 
 the young girl ; she had recovered consciousness in a measure, 
 but she was dull and not clear of mind. He feared that, later 
 on, fever or lung disease might be developed. He spoke lung 
 and learnedly with many scientific terms ; his auditor heard hiui 
 impatiently. 
 
 ' Shall I see her ? ' he asked. 
 
 The other answered that this could be as he pleased. 
 
 Othmar hesitated a little while, then re-entered his library. 
 
 The electric light which illumined it bathed in its effulgence 
 the poor dusky ill-clad form of Damaris, Avhere it was stretched 
 on the couch almost under the great statue of Andromache, 
 sculptured by Mercier. Her clothes were rough, even ragged ; 
 her feet were clad in coarsest stockings of hemp ; her whole 
 figure was expressive of extreme poverty, that ugly and cruel 
 thing which would blanch the cheeks of Aphrodite or Helen ; 
 and yet on her face, as the light fell on her where her head 
 rested on the purple leather of the cushions, there was a great 
 loveliness, though wan and dulled and fevered. The features 
 had a sculpture-like repose, and the tumbled hair, thougli 
 lustreless, was rich and of fine colour ; her eyelids were closed ; 
 her mouth was half open, as if with pain or thirst. 
 
 Hung by a little piece of sliabby ribbon from her throat lie 
 saw a small gold object. He was touched to the heart when he 
 recognised in it the little maritime compass which he had 
 begged her to keep in memory of their moonlit sail together. 
 
 Slie had nearly lost lier life from hunger, yet she had not 
 sold this little jewel ! Why? Because slie had always regarded 
 it as his, or because the memory of that moonlit voyage in 
 the open boat was pleasant to her. A flush of feeling passed 
 over his face as he thought so ; and remembered his wife. 
 What two romantic simpletons both he and this poor child 
 Avould seem to her, could she know the fidelity with which tlie 
 little gift had been kept, and the emotion Avith which he re- 
 garded it ! 
 
 ' Um sensitive, indeed ! ' ha thought with emotion, recalling 
 that epithet which his Avife had contemptuously bestowed on 
 her. A soul how little fitted for the rude realities and cruel 
 egotisms of the world ! 
 
 As he drew near, her eyes slowly opened and looked at him 
 with a dreamy, heavy, half-conscious look. 
 
 * Do you know me 1 ' he said gently. 
 
 She made a sign of assent. 
 
 Othmar took one of her hands in his. A great emotion 
 stirred in liim ; he had always the vision of the child beside 
 whom lie had sailed across the moonlit sea, with the sweet 
 fragrance of the orange-groves coming to them through the 
 shadows and the stillness of the night. 
 
 ' Lie still and rest, my dear,' he said to her. ♦ You are safe,
 
 15(5 OTHMAR. 
 
 and I am your friend. Can you understand me ? Good-night. 
 To-morrow we Avill talk together.' 
 
 She looked at him with comprehension and with gratitude ; 
 two large tears gathered in her eyes and fell slowly down her 
 cheeks. She had no power to speak. 
 
 When the morrow came she was lying insensible on a bed in 
 one of the largest chambers of the house, a room of which the 
 windows looked out upon the green sward and tall fountains 
 and stately trees of the gardens, and where scarcely any sound 
 from the streets around could penetrate. Exposure and hunger 
 had brought on pleurisy; Sisters of Cimrity had been sent for 
 to attend her, and all the resources of modern science were 
 called to her assistance. Had she been a young sovereign of a 
 great country she could not have been better ministere^d to or 
 more carefully assisted tlirougli the darkness and peril of 
 sickness. 
 
 'Spare notliing,' said Othmar to his physicians, careless of 
 •what evil construction might be placed upon his generosity. 
 
 He_ was obeyed with that complete and eager obedience 
 which is one of tlie treasures rich men can command, and which 
 may somewhat atone to them for the subserviency and fulsome- 
 ness of mankind. 
 
 CHAriEU XXT. 
 
 Otiimar -went from her chamber to that of his uncle, lying 
 dumb, unconscious, almost inanimate in his little hotel in the 
 Rue de Traktir, all the innumerable wires which connected that 
 little house Avith the Bourses of many nations only serving now 
 to bear north, south, east, west, the words so momentous to the 
 ear of financial Europe : 
 
 * Ze Boron Frledrich se meurf.' 
 
 Many there were who trembled at these few words ; more 
 who rejoiced to know that the keen eyes were closed, the subtle 
 brain paralysed, the powerful mind swamped in a flood of dark- 
 ness. He had millions of enemies, thousands of sycophants, 
 few friends ; crowds came about his door to know how near he 
 was to death, but it was of the share list and the money market 
 lliat they thought : how would his loss aflect this scheme, those 
 actions, these banks, that syndicate? 
 
 ' Heaven and earth ! ' thought his nephew, ' all this excite- 
 ment, this outcry, tliis anxiety, and amongst it all not one single 
 honest thought of regret for the man who lies dying !' 
 
 H in love we only give what we possess and can do no more, 
 Eo in life we receive that wliich we desire. Friedrich Othmar 
 had wished for success, for power, for the means to panUyse
 
 OTHMAR. 157 
 
 rations, inspire wars, control governments, purchase and in- 
 fluence humanity. He had had his wish ; but now that he lay 
 dying these thing left him poor. 
 
 Men who had eaten his admirable dinners through a score of 
 seasons, said in their clubs : ' ie vieux farceur ! est-ce iTai quHl 
 creve ? ' and women who had fitted up their costly villas and 
 adorned their worthless persons at his cost hurried to his rooms 
 and took away these jewels, tliose enamels, tliat aquarelle, this 
 medallion, whatever they could lay their hands on, screaming 
 ' C'est d moi ! c'est a moi ! c'cst a moi I ' 
 
 Othmar when he had arrived there, on the first intelligence 
 of his uncle's attack of hemiplegia, had found the house already 
 sacked as though an invading army had passed through the 
 apartments ; ' ces dames ont plnce parci et par la,'' said the ser- 
 vants, not confessing their own collusion, with apology. Hardly 
 anything of value that was portable had been left in it ; they 
 had all robbed this poor, senseless, fallen monarch as they 
 would. 
 
 Othmar was filled with an invincible melancholy as he stood 
 beside the bedside of this man, whose vast intellect had been 
 suddenly beaten down into nothingness as a bull is brained by 
 the slaughterer. There had been no great aflection between 
 them ; their views had been too opposed, their characters too 
 utterly different for sympathy, or even for much mutual com- 
 prehension, but he had always done full justice to the unerring 
 intelligence, the stubborn courage, and the devoted loyalty to 
 the interests of his house, which were so conspicuous in Fried- 
 rich Othmar, and he knew that his loss Avoukl leave a place in 
 his own life, public and private, which would never be filled up 
 again. No one not bound to him by ties of blood and of family 
 honour would ever care for his interests, work for his welfare, 
 guard his i-ei^ute, and consolidate his fortunes as Friedrich 
 Othmar had done from the days of his boyhood. They had 
 often been shar2)ly opposed in opinion and in action, and more 
 than once the elder man had learned that the younger man 
 deemed him well-nigh a knave, whilst the elder held the 
 younger in complete derision as a dreaming fool. But despite 
 all this there had been that bond between them of community of 
 interest and kinship of descent which no hireling service and 
 no friendship of aliens could ever replace. 
 
 Othmar knew that, this man dead, he himself would stand 
 utterly alone in many ways and in many difficulties with which 
 no other would ever have power or title to advise or to assist 
 him. There were engagements, obligations, secret treaties, 
 and concealed alliances in his house of which he would bear 
 the burden alone, Friedrich Othmar being once gathered to Ins 
 fathers. And, selfishness apart, there was a keen pang to hinx 
 in the sight of his old friend lying prone like any falkn treC; iu
 
 158 OTHMAR. 
 
 the knowledge that the quick wit would never more play about 
 those silent lips, and the clear flame of reason and of scorn would 
 never more flash from those closed eyes. 
 
 He was dying : soon he would be dead : and Friodrich 
 Othmar Avas one of those who make the dream of immortality 
 seem as grotesque as the child's hope to meet her doll in heaven. 
 Who could think of him without his slow, satiric smile, his fine 
 inti'icate speculations, his genius at whist, his perfect burgundies, 
 his firm white hand which, touching a button in the wall, could 
 speed an assent or a refusal which served to convulse Europe % 
 ' Immortal ? — what tmixd ! ' ho would have said, with his 
 most good-humoured contempt for the dull and grotesque sliapes 
 in wliich human illusions, ideas, hopes, and creeds have so oddly 
 6ha2)ed themselves. 
 
 ' You VN'ill find everything in order,' he had said more than 
 once to Othmar. 'I shall die suddenly one day, in all proba- 
 bility. I leave everything in perfect order every day. You 
 •will only have to wdnd up the watch after I am gone. iBut will 
 you take the trouble to wind it % ' 
 
 That was his doubt, the doubt which had tormented him 
 in many an hour. 
 
 Ofhmar now, leaving the warm golden light of the streets 
 and the summer air, sweet-scented even in Paris from passing 
 over the hay-fields and the flower gardens of the country round" 
 and the blossoms of the limes upon the boulevards, entered the 
 hushed, close, darkened room with a sense of coming loss and 
 of impending calamity. There was no sound but of the heavy, 
 laboured breathing of the dying man. 
 
 ' There is no change ? ' he asked of the attendants, but he 
 knew their answer beforehand ; there could be no change but 
 one — the last. 
 
 Life mechanical, painful, sustained and prolonged by arti- 
 ficial means, w\as there still, but all else w^as over— over the 
 manifold combinations, the daring projects, the cool unerring 
 ambitions, the pitiless study and usage of men, the trafiic in war 
 and want, the wisdom which knew when to stoop and when to 
 command, the skill which could gather and hold so safely all the 
 cross threads of a million intrigues, the intellect which found 
 its fullest pleasure in the problems of finance and the great 
 needs of nations. All these were over, and the quick, cautious, 
 ■wise and well-stored brain was shattered and ruined like a mere 
 piece of clock-work that a child stamps in pieces with an angry 
 ioot. 
 
 Of course he had long known that what had come now might 
 come any day ; that at the age of his uncle the marvel was rather 
 his perfect health, his clear brain, his strong volition, than any 
 mortal stroke which might befall him. 
 
 Tlie afternoon was growing to a close j without, there were
 
 OTHMAR. 159 
 
 the sounds of trafiic find of pleasure ; through the closed Vene- 
 tian blinds the air came into the room, which was hot, dark, 
 filled with the soporilic odours of stimulants and medicines. 
 Great physicians waited by the death-bed, though they could do 
 nothing to avert the sure coming of death. Othmar sat there 
 and watched with them. Now and then someone spoke in a 
 Avhispcr, that was all. Tlic end was near at hand. The sun sank 
 and the evening came. There wa.s always the same slow, ster- 
 torous breathing so painful on the ear of the listener, so expres- 
 sive of effort and of suli'ering still existent in that inert unconscious 
 mass which lay motionless upon the bed. 
 
 As the hours passed on, Othmar Avent downstairs and broke 
 a little bread, took a little wine, then returned to the chamber 
 of death and waited there. They told him that as the night 
 wore away the last struggle must come. Death loves the hour 
 before dawn. 
 
 Many thoughts came to the watcher as lie sat there ; they 
 were melancholy and tired thoughts. Life seemed to him, as to 
 Heine, like a child lost in the dark. What was the use of all 
 the energy and effort, all the desire and regret, all the grief and 
 hojae, all the knowledge and ambition ? The issue of them all 
 at their best was a few years of success and of renown, then 
 a brain which refused to do its work any more, a body which was 
 but as the carcass of a slaughtered beast. 
 
 The hours stole on, the strokes of the clocks echoed through 
 the silent house, the wheels of the passing carriages made low 
 and muliled sounds upon the tan laid down on the street be- 
 neatli in needless precaution for ears deaf for ever, for a brain 
 for ever numb and senseless. The evening became night and 
 niglit brightened towards morning ; a little bird sang at the 
 closed shutter. Othmar rose and opened one of the windows 
 and looked out ; it was daybreak. Tiiere was a soft mist over the 
 masses of verdure of the Bois, and in the sky a pale, dim light. 
 
 ' Shall I die like this % ' he thought ; ' and will my son sorrow 
 no more for me than I sorrow now l — wlio can tell ?' 
 
 He stood gazing out at tlie shadowy houses and the dim out- 
 lines of the avenues. "W'lien he turned back fj-om the window 
 he saw that the hand of tlie dying man feebly beckoned him. 
 In the supreme moment of severance from earth, the stunned 
 mind recovered one momentary gleam of consciousness, the mute 
 lijis one momentary spasm of thickened, struggling speech ; once 
 more and once more only the tongue obeyed the order of its 
 master — the brain. 
 
 FriedricliOtlmiar looked at him with eyes that for an instant 
 Baw. 
 
 ' Do not make that loan — do not make that loan,' he said 
 with his paralysed lips. ' Wait — wait ; there will be war.' 
 
 His master passion ruled him in his death.
 
 i6o OTILMAR. 
 
 Then he nricacle a movement of his right hand as thougli he 
 wrote his signature to some deed. 
 
 ' The house — the house — tell them the house will not -' 
 
 he muttered thickly, then a spasm choked his voice, the agony 
 began ; in less than an hour he was dead. 
 
 ' God save me from such a death as this ! ' thought Othmar 
 as the full day broke. ' Rather let me die a beggar in the high 
 road, but with some love about me, some hope Avithin my heart ! ' 
 
 And the mouth of the dead man seemed to smile, as though 
 the dead brain knew his thoughts, as though the dead lips said 
 to him : 
 
 ' Oh, dreamer ! — Oh, fool ! ' 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 The death of Friedrich Othmar brought incrf^ascd occupation 
 and cares upon hnn, and the first few days after the obsequies 
 were too full for him to give more than a passing thought once 
 or twice in twenty-four hours to the sick girl lying under his 
 roof. He asked each day after her health, and they each day 
 answered him that the progress made in it was now all that could 
 be wished ; youth and strength had reasserted tlieir rights. He 
 was imjaortuned by a thousand claimants on his uncle's properties, 
 fatigued by a thousand attempts at imposition and extortion ; all 
 the wearisome details which harass the living and add a million- 
 fold to the horrors of every death, encompassed him all daylong. 
 
 All that the old man had possessed he had bequeathed un- 
 conditionally to his nephew, and there Avere many companions of 
 his late pleasures who clamoured incessantly to his heir for re- 
 cognition of their unlawful demands. Ail these matters detained 
 him in Paris until midsummer had waned, and a weary sense of 
 irreparable loss and of harassed irritation Avas Avith him, through 
 all these long summer days, a\ liicli found him for the first time 
 in his life in the stone Avails of a city Avhen fruits were ripe and 
 roses were blooming in shady, frngrant, country places. 
 
 The whole temperament of Otlnxiar Avas one to Avhich busi- 
 ness Avas antagonistic and oppressiA^e in the greatest degree ; 
 nature had made him a student and a dreamer, and all the dull, 
 fretting cares Avhich accompany the administration of all great 
 fortunes and houses of finance Avcre to him the most irksome 
 and distasteful of all bondage. But theyAvere fastened in their 
 golden fetters on his life as the burden of the iA'ory and silver 
 hoAvdah lies heavy as lead upon the back of an elephant in a state 
 procession. And noAv there Avas no longer beside him the 
 astute Avisdom, the ready invention, the untiring capacity of 
 Friedrich Othmar, to take olf his shoulders this mass of affairs,
 
 OTHMAR. i6i 
 
 of projects, of public demands, of state necessities supplied or 
 deniecl, of all the throngs of supplicants, of sycophants, of 
 enemies or of allies, who day after day besieged the Maison 
 d'Othmar, 
 
 In these hot summer days in Paris, in the empty chambers 
 of his uncle's house, all the old weariness and disgust at fate 
 came back upon him. He would willingly have cast aside all 
 the power which men envied him, to be free to spend his time 
 as he would, and shut the door of his room on these buyers and 
 sellers of gold, these trafhckers in war and want, these specu- 
 lators in the folly or greed of mankind who call themselves the 
 princes of finance. 
 
 ' Les delicats ne sont pas vetus pour le voyage de la vie ; ils 
 n'ont pas la botte grossiei'e qui resiste aux cailloux et ne craint 
 pas la fange.' 
 
 Othmar was a delicat, and most of the ambitions and all the 
 prizes of life seemed to him supremely vulgar. It was a tem- 
 perament Avhich shut him out from the sympathies of men 
 and made him appear eccentric, when he was only made of finer 
 and more sensitive moral and mental fibre than were those 
 around him. 
 
 Meanwhile the child he had rescued was passing through 
 the weary stages of pleuro-pneumonia, succoured by all that 
 science and care could do for her, and slowly recovered to find 
 herself with amaze lying on a soft bed, a canopy of pale-blue 
 silk above her, and around her white panelled walls painted 
 with groups of field-flowers, whilst from a wide bay window 
 there came, tempered by pale-blue blinds, the ardent sunbeams 
 and the hot air of July. It was only one of the many bed- 
 chambers of the Hotel d'Othmar, but to her in her fii-st 
 moments of convalescence, as the fragrance from the garden 
 below came through the room, and the distant music of some 
 passing regiment was wafted on the warm south wind, it seemed 
 a very part of paradise itself. 
 
 She did not remember very much ; her mind was hazy 
 and indolent through great weakness, but she remembered 
 that she had seen Othmar. She knew that he had said to 
 her, 'I am your friend.' Her attendants, the nuns, were 
 astonished and annoyed that she asked them no questions ; 
 her taciturnity was irritating to their own loquacity and in- 
 quisitiveness. But she was silent from neither shame nor ob- 
 stinacy ; she was silent becaiise she was utterly bewildered, and 
 shrank willingly into the shelter of this knowledge of her safety 
 under his roof, as a hunted hare shrinks under fern and bough. 
 She never saw him after that first night in his library ; but she 
 heard his name often spoken, and she understood that every 
 good thing came to her from him. 
 
 The fresh flowers in the china bowls, the books when she waa 
 
 w
 
 1 62 OTHMAR. 
 
 well enough to read, the volumes of drawings and engravings 
 which amused her feeble tired mind, the grapes, and the nec- 
 tarines, and the pines, piled in pyramids of beautiful colour on 
 their porcelain dishes — all these things came, no doubt, from 
 him ; indeed, whenever she asked any questions, she was always 
 answered by his name. 
 
 A great unconquerable lassitude and melancholy lay upon 
 her ; yet, under it, she was soothed and lulled by the sense of 
 this invisible but absolute protection. It was as a shield 
 between her and the misery which she had undergone ; it filled 
 her with a vague, grateful sense of safety and of sympathy. As 
 far as she could be sensible of much in tlie feebleness of illness, 
 she was dully conscious that Othmar had stood between her and 
 some crowning wretchedness, some unutterable horror. 
 
 He never asked to see her. 
 
 It seemed to him that to thrust hiiuself upon her would be 
 brutally to recall and emphasise the fact of all she owed to 
 him : it would seem to cry out to her her own helijlessness and 
 his sei'vices. Extreme and even exaggerated dehcacy had 
 always marked the charities he had shown to those he be- 
 friended ; and in this instance it seemed to him that only 
 entire efi'acement of himself could make endurable to her her 
 sojourn under his roof. To reconcile her to it at all appeared 
 to him almost impossible. As far as he could learn slae was 
 quite friendless and alone: what would he be able to do for her 
 in the present and in the future ? 
 
 He was more anxious than he knew to hear her story from 
 her own lips, but he would not have any request to her made 
 to receive him. A guest in his own house, above all when she 
 was poor and homeless, must send for him as a queen would 
 send before he could enter lier chamber. It was one of those 
 exaggerations of delicate sentiment which had always made him 
 at once so absurd and so incomprehensible to Friedrich 
 Othmar, and to mankind in general. For the majority of the 
 woi'ld does not err on the side of delicacy, and is colour-blind 
 before the more subtle shades of feeling. 
 
 During these later weeks, which were filled for him with 
 dull and distasteful cares, Damaris was recovering more fully 
 and more rapidly health and strength than she bad done at first 
 in the atmosphere of luxury and service by which she was 
 surromided ; it was the first illness that she had ever known, 
 and she could not understand her own weakness, the languor 
 which lay so heavily on her, the sense of dreaming instead of 
 living which the lassitude and beatitude of convalescence 
 brought to her. 
 
 She had grown ; she liad l<>st all the warm sea bloom upon 
 Jier face a.nd arms ; she was very thin, and her eyes looked too 
 large for her other features : but she was nearly well again,
 
 OTHMAR. 163 
 
 and only a little pain in her breathing, a sense of feebleness in 
 her limbs, remained from the dangerous malady which had 
 threatened to cut her life short in its earliest blossom. When 
 she could think coherently, and understand clearly, her shame 
 at the beggar's position to which she had sunk was shared and 
 outweighed by lier j^assionate gratitude to her deliverer. The 
 figure of Otlimar was always before her eyes, god-like, angel- 
 like, stooping to deliver her from the mire and horror of the 
 streets of Paris. 
 
 ' Could I see him ? ' she said at last to her attendants ; the 
 question had been upon her lips many days, but she had not 
 had courage to put it into woixls. They promised her to tell 
 him that she wished it, and they did so. 
 
 ' I will see her, certainly, in the forenoon to-morrow,' said 
 Othmar, moved by the request to a sudden sense of the strange- 
 ness and responsibility of his own position towards her. What 
 would Nadege see in it % Something supremely ridiculous, no 
 doubt. Something of the ' lac et nacelle ' school worthy of the 
 romanticists of tlie year '30 X 
 
 As yet he had not even informed her of the bare fact that 
 this child of the island was in his house in Paris. 
 
 He looked often at the portrait by Loswa of the child with 
 the red fishing-cai) on her auburn curls, and he always heard the 
 mocking of his Avife's voice saying with her careless amused 
 raillery : ' 8i vous en devcnez amoureux V 
 
 And each time that he was about to tell her as he wrote to 
 licr that the girl for whom she had predicted the destiny of 
 Aimee Desclee was lying mortally sick and apparently wholly 
 friendless beneath his roof, the recollection of that raillery made 
 him unwilling to provoke it anew. She might share his com- 
 passion and appreciate his motives : it was possible that she might 
 
 do so if — ij I the narrative reached her in one of what she 
 
 called her })ons moments. He knew that there were emotions 
 both of generosity and of pity in her nature, but he knew also 
 that they were fitful and uncertain in their action. He had 
 never known her stirred twice to intei'est in the same ol)ject ; 
 her caprices were, as she had said, like a convolvulus flower, 
 and only blossomed for a day ; when a thing or a perso'n had 
 ceased to interest her, sooner could a mummy have been 
 awaked to consciousness under its swathings of linen tlian 
 her attention be recalled and attracted to it any more. 
 
 ' Quand Va7ninir est murt, il est hien morf,' says a cruel 
 truism ; and as it is with love so was it with her fancies and 
 enthusiasms. Once dead and forgotten there was no resurrec- 
 tion for them. 
 
 He knew that with her everything depended on her mood. 
 A great tragedy or a great heroism would seem to her admirable 
 or absurd, precisely according to the humour of the liour ; a 
 
 M 2
 
 1 64 OTHMAR. 
 
 Iiatlictic history or a terrilile calamity would find her disposed 
 either to turn it into ridicule, or receive it with sympathy, 
 merely as her day had been agreeable or tiresome, as her com- 
 ])anions had interested or wearied her, as her toilette had pleaseo 
 or displeased her. 
 
 'My dear Otho,' she had said once to him, when he had 
 ventured on some courtecusly-worded reproof of this extreme 
 uucertainty of her temperament, ' if I did not get a little variety 
 t)ut of my own sensations, I should never find any at all any- 
 where. I cannot be like the editor of a newspaper, who, what- 
 ever may happen, always has his joy or his woe already in 
 stereotype and large capitals. If one gets up in the morning to 
 find a grey sky when one wants a blue one, to find a dull post- 
 bag instead of an amusing one, to be disappointed in the effect 
 of a costume, to be prevented from riding by getting a chill, 
 what can one care if all Europe were in fiames ? Whereas, if 
 everything is pleasant when one wakes, one remains quite 
 amiable enough all the morning to be soriy even for Gavroche 
 .and Cossette in the street ! Caprice ? No, it is not precisely 
 caprice. It is rather something in one's temperament which 
 is acted on by one's surroundings, as the barometer is by the 
 weather. If I have ever done any very generous or great things, 
 as you are flattering enough to tell me that I have, it must have 
 been at some exceptional moment when Worth had especially 
 ])]eased me. All the finer inspirations of women come from 
 satisfaction with themselves or their gowns ! ' 
 
 At the present moment she was carrying her graceful person 
 and her unchangeable ennni to the various great houses which 
 she deigned to honour ; imperial hunting chalets, royal riverain 
 castles, noble summer palaces set on moinitain side, in forest 
 shadows, or on broad historic streams. She did not deem it 
 necessary to go into retreat because her old enemy was dead. 
 She telegraphed her condolence to Othmar, and thought that 
 enough ; she had some exquisite costumes made en demi-deuU, 
 wore no jewels except pearls, and had no bouquets save white 
 ones. So much was concession enough to the usages of the 
 world at such moments ; Friedrich Othmar himself would not 
 have expected more. 
 
 Yet a vague regret, which was sincere, had touched her on 
 receiving the telegram which announced his death. She had 
 respected his intellect and his wit ; she had even rather liked 
 him for his stubliorn and uncompromising hatred of herself. 
 
 When the world was so flat and so tame, and human nature 
 BO monotonous, anyone with chaiacter enough to hate unchange- 
 ably was to her interesting. 
 
 And her own iiitelligcnce had enal)led her to measure and 
 appreciate all tlie wortli ni his counsels and of his presence in 
 the Maison d'Othmar. She had nii idea that her husband, now
 
 OTHMAR. 165 
 
 that he would be uncontrolled, would drive the chariot of his 
 fortunes in some such disastrous manner as Phaeton, only not 
 from Phaeton's ambition, but from contempt and discontent. 
 ' Only tliere is the child, liappily there is tiie child,' she thought ; 
 a little fair-haired, happy boy then plaj^ing on tlie sands of the 
 northern seas, scarcely more than a baby ; but, possibly, link 
 enough with the future of the world to make a sentimentalist 
 like his father refrain from ruining his heritage. ' A qiidque 
 chose faihlcsse est bonne,' she reflected Avith a compassionate 
 smile. 
 
 She was at that time at Tsarkoe Selo. 
 
 She did not love the Imj^erial Court, nor did the Imperial 
 Court love her ; but they made bonne ')nxne to one another for 
 many potent reasons, and as matter of wise diplomacy on both 
 sides. She was a woman whom even sovereigns cared not to 
 oflend, for her delicate and merciless raillery could pierce 
 through rob(^s of ermme and cuirass of gold, whilst she could 
 sway her husband as she chose in any question of politics or 
 public life. On her side she, for the sake of jSTapraxine's sons, 
 desired always to retain her influence with and to remain a 
 2->crsona (jrafa to the rulers of her country. She Avas not given 
 to moods of remorse or of penitence, but sometimes her con- 
 science smote her for her treatment throughout their life 
 together of Platon Naj^raxine, and as a kind of atonement to 
 him she studied the social advantages and future welfare of his 
 children with a care which was perhaps of more real use to them 
 than the efl'usions of maternal sentiment would ever have been. 
 She disliked their personal presence at all times, but she never 
 neglected their material interests. 
 
 There was something also in Russia which pleased her tem- 
 perament, something which no other land could quite afl'ord 
 her. The vassalage and submission of the people gave her a 
 sense of absolute dominion, more entire than any she could feel 
 elsewhere. The intense and sharp contrasts of life which were 
 there, the supreme culture beside the dense ignorance, the 
 hothouse beside the isba, the orchid beside the icicle, stimu- 
 lated her surfeited taste and moved her languid imagination. 
 Though belief was not her weakness usually, yet she believed 
 in the future of Russia. She would have liked to be herself 
 upon the throne of Catherine, and to stretch her sceptre till it 
 touched the Indian Ocean and the Yellow Sea. 
 
 She did not ofler to return to him when Othmar notified the 
 death of his uncle, and his own detention by various afl'airs in 
 Paris. She wrote to him to join her wherever she might be 
 whenever he should liave leisure, and did not display any im- 
 patience that this should be soon. She liked his comyianion- 
 ship — when he did not weary her by any ' madrigals,' or irritate 
 her by any sentimental enthusiasms with which she could feel
 
 i66 OTHMAR. 
 
 no agreement. She was never disposed to wisli liim away when 
 he was beside her, or failed to admit that the resources of his 
 intellect, and the symimthetic quality of his character, made 
 him always agreeable. But as she had said to him, with her 
 usual candour, she knew all about him ; his character was a 
 volume she had read through, he had ceased to possess that 
 charm of novelty which goes for so much in the power which 
 one life possesses to interest another ; he would never again 
 make her pulse beat a throb the quicker, if indeed he had ever 
 done so. She bore his absence with an equanimity so philo- 
 soi)hic that to liira it appeared indistinguishable from in- 
 difference. 
 
 More than once when he was on the point of taking up his 
 pen and writing to her of the circumstances which had brought 
 her future Desclee beneath his roof, he was stopped by the 
 sheer nervous apprehension of ridicule which paralyses delicate 
 minds, and that sense that his communication would be 
 supremely uninteresting to her, which is sufficient to make a 
 proud and sensitive temperament refrain from any confidence. 
 She would inevitably laugh at him as a Bayard of the boule- 
 vards, as a Sir Galahad of the asphalte, even if she took the 
 trouble to read the narrative to its end — which was most 
 doubtful. He decided to wait to tell it to her till he saw her : 
 till he found her some day in a gentle and sympathetic mood. 
 Besides, with whatever indifference and raillery she might view 
 it, his knovvdedge of women told him that, nevertheless, his 
 protection of Damaris Berarde might not seem to her the mere 
 inevitable and innocent thing that it really was. 
 
 At all times he wrote but rarely to her. He had too often 
 seen her throw aside hastily, or only half read, perhaps not 
 read at all, the letters of the cleverest and most preferred of 
 her friends, for him to believe that his own letters would be 
 likely to be rewarded with much closer attention. The de- 
 lighted welcome which a woman gives to the writing of one she 
 cares for, the eagerness and frequency with which it is studied 
 and searched for all its expressions of tenderness, and all its 
 more hidden meaning, was altogether impossible to the Lady of 
 Amyot. Spoken love interested her so slightly that written 
 love could not possibly hope to charm her. People were tire- 
 some enough in speech ; what could be expected of them when 
 they wrote ? Pie would have read anything she miglit have 
 written with keenest interest, with warmest reception, but he 
 did not dare to suppose that she would have much patience if 
 he wearied her on paper, ^^'hen they were apart, therefore, 
 they telegraphed often to one another, but they wrote to each 
 other seldom. Telegrams were to her agreeable, because they 
 were as little of an cnnnl as any communication can pos- 
 sibly be.
 
 OTHMAR. 167 
 
 In an early time Othmar, absent from her, had been given 
 to pour out his feelings in ardent expression, and even offer her 
 those delicate flowers of sentiment which always dwell shyly 
 hidden in every deep and afiectionate temperament. But one 
 day she had written back to him a cruel little word. She had 
 said : ' You are Obermann and Amiel ; do you really think life 
 is either long enough or interestmg enough to be worth so very 
 much sentimental speculation 1 ' 
 
 It was only her irresistible and incurable poco-curantism 
 Avhich dictated the lines, but they mortified and chilled him. 
 He dreaded, with something that was actually ai^prehension, 
 her ridicule or her irony. He knew well that to weary her was 
 to lose her favour. From that day he had never written to 
 her a syllable of the feelings and reflections of his inmost 
 thoughts. 
 
 'She has never really loved me,' he had said to himself 
 bitterly, of the woman on whom he had spent the great passion 
 of his life. 
 
 Therefore it became easy to him to say nothing of the pre- 
 sence of Damaris in his house in Paris. 
 
 ' I shall tell her when I meet her, and she will not even listen 
 to it, most probably,' he said to himself. It would entirely 
 depend upon the mood in which he might find her, whether the 
 part which he had himself played would seem to her utterly 
 absurd or partly worthy of sympathy. 
 
 ' If only Melville were in Europe ! ' he thought very often. 
 But Melville was in China, using his persuasive eloquence and 
 Churchman's tact to obtain Celestial concessions and protection 
 to the Jesuit missions in the Flowery Land. Melville had 
 written to him : ' I walk amongst the ruined palaces and deso- 
 lated gardens which tlie Allies defiled in 1860, and endeavour to 
 believe that it is we who are the civilised and the Chinese who 
 are the barbaric people, but I fail. Shall we ever be apostles of 
 light whilst our coming is proclaimed with musketry, and our 
 path strewn before us with charred ruins? It was a strange 
 way of teaching enlightenment to destroy in a day ti-easures of 
 beauty and of art Avhich all the world together could not repro- 
 duce again.' 
 
 ]\Ielville was taking his scholarly thought and his courtly 
 smile through the flowering ways and over the marble bridges . 
 of the Summer Palace, believing, if he thought of her at all, 
 that the child he had baptized and taught was safe in her island 
 home amongst the flowering orange-trees, steering through the 
 blue water at her will, and going in peace and quietude to the 
 churches on the shore.
 
 1 63 on I MAR. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 Ix the morning he was detained by many matters of importance, 
 and it was towards evening when he at length found leisure to 
 visit his guest. He felt a certain hesitation and delicacy in 
 entering' her presence. He was conscious that he had done so 
 much for her that, on her side, she could not meet him without 
 some embarrassment, some pain. 
 
 He had seen her but twice ; he was no more to her than a 
 name. Yet he had known her in her island life : he thought 
 that tie of memory would make liim seem to her less of a stran- 
 ger than any of these white-coifed pious women who changed 
 places in vigil at her bedside. And a wonder which was warmer 
 and wider than mere curiosity made him anxious to learn how 
 she could have become alone and adrift in Paris, slie whose life 
 had been so safe and so sweet and so simple in the midst of 
 the blue water and the flashing sunbeams, and free from spot or 
 stain as the white narcissus growing in the orchard grass, as the 
 white wings of the pigeons cleaving the azure air. 
 
 When he entered her chamber she was lying on a couch be- 
 side the open window ; one of the Sisters was sitting near her 
 doing some needlework. She flushed over all her face as she 
 saw him, and she put out her hand timidly. Othmar bent over 
 it and touched it with his lips in silence. Emotion held them 
 both mute. The nun looked inquisitively at them. 
 
 Damaris was still weak, and pale, and changed, but there 
 was the look of fast returning health about her. She was thin 
 still, but no longer emaciated ; her lips had regained a little of 
 their damask-rose colour, her hair which had been cut short was 
 bright and shining ; she wore a loose plain linen gown which 
 the women had made for her, and her arms were bare to the 
 elbow ; the afternoon was close and sultry, and she seemed to 
 breathe with eflbrt. 
 
 ' I am so glad to see you so nearly well, my dear, and my wife 
 will be no less glad to hear of your recovery,' said Othmar, as 
 he recovered his self-possession. It was a subterfuge, in a way 
 an untruth ; but he used his wife's name almost involuntarily, 
 -as tlie only possible way of reconciling this child to her presence 
 in his house. 
 
 'You have been very good,' said Damaris simply. Her 
 ■words seemed poor and thankless, but she could think of no 
 better ones. She was slill bewildered at her own position, and 
 wounded in her tendcrcst jiride by the charity she had received. 
 She was not ungrateful, but now that she saw him face to face, 
 she would liave given lar soid that he had let her die on tlio 
 Etouc3 of Pari:*.
 
 OTHMAR. \G) 
 
 ' Where did yoxi find me ? ' slie added, * I cannot remember 
 — at least not everything.' 
 
 ' You Avere taken unwell on the Solf* rino Lridgo,' said 0th- 
 mar evasively. ' Do not think about that. You are safe here, 
 and all my house is at your service ; it is yours whilst you are 
 in it, as the Spaniards say.' 
 
 He spoke a little hurriedly ; ho felt the embarrassment which 
 every generous nature feels before one whoni it has benetited. 
 
 The red blood came quickly and painfully over her face and 
 throat. 
 
 ' I do remember now,' she said. ' They were going to take 
 me to prison. Can they do that when one has done no harm \ ' 
 ' The guard thought you looked ill, and were too young to 
 be alone at night,' Othmar answered, evasively still. He wished 
 to learn something of her position, but he would not even hint 
 any question to her. She should say what she chose in her own 
 time and way. 
 
 'I do not mind being alone,' she replied, Avith something of 
 Ihe old pride and independence which Loswa had admired in 
 h^r. ' I was weak because I had not eaten.' 
 She stopped abruptly, and grew scarlet. 
 
 It seemed very shameful to her to have been without food. 
 She had always despised the poor crawling beggars whom she 
 had seen on the mainland, even whilst she had given them all 
 the loose coin in her pocket. ' Only the lazy and the idle ever 
 starve,' her grandfather had often said to her, in the hardness 
 of heart of a man full of energies and riches ; and she had be- 
 lieved him. And now she had starved, she herself, and it 
 seemed to her pitiful, miserable, hateful, a very brand for ever 
 of disgrace. 
 
 ' Do not think of it,' said Othmar kindly, as he took her hand 
 in his. 
 
 ' I shall think of it all my life ! ' she said bitterly, whilst tlie 
 intensity of the tone told him that it was no mere empty phrase. 
 She turned her face from him and looked steadfastly out into 
 the green spaces and pleasant shadows of the gardens below, 
 whilst her young features grew cold and stern, and full of re- 
 pressed pain. Then all at once her head drooped on her breast, 
 and she burst into a passion of tears. 
 
 ' Oh, why did you not let me die ! ' she cried in reproach to 
 him. ' Why did you not let me die when I was d} ing ? I 
 should have known nothing now ! ' 
 
 ' That is thankless and sinful,' muttered the nun. * Thankless 
 and sinful to heaven and to earth.' 
 
 ' Hush ! ' said Othmar to the Sister with a frown ; he was 
 troubled and distressed by the child's passionate rebuke. He 
 hated at all times to see the sorrow of a woman, and he was too 
 ignoi'ant of her circumstances to know how to console her. He
 
 le 
 
 lyo OTHMAR. 
 
 could not have told wliy, but a memory of Yseulte passed over 
 his mind ; a memory which rarely ever rose at any time before 
 liis thoughts. Nothing could be more unlike her than this sea- 
 born, impetuous, daring child; yet he remembered her as he 
 saw Damaris weep. How many tears had the dead girl wept 
 for him ! how often had her young eyes looked wistful and 
 sorrowful out on these green gardens, on these towering trees, 
 on these distant and gilded domes of Paris ! 
 
 The nun cast angry glances at him, and began to tell her 
 beads. 
 
 Othmar remained silent till the first force of grief had a little 
 spent itself. Then he said the first consoling words which 
 occurred to him', without remembering all to which they might 
 commit him in the future. 
 
 ' My dear child, do not talk of death. Death and youth are 
 horrible in the same phrase. Your life is scarcely begun, why 
 should you wish it away \ If you have no other friends than 
 ourselves, do not deem yourself friendless. We will supply the 
 place of others to you. You will remember the interest which 
 my Avife took in you at St. Pharamond. Believe me, it will be 
 only strengthened by any sorrow or misfortune you may have 
 had since we saw you then.' 
 
 She looked at him, strongly grateful, yet hurt and ashamed. 
 
 ' It is charity,' she said, in a low tone. All the pride of her 
 indomitable childhood was in the word. 
 
 ' I do not like the expression,' he replied. ' You will pain 
 me if you use it. I should be a cur if I had not done the little 
 that I have done, for you would certainly,' lie added more 
 gaily, ' have done as much for me if I had been wrecked off 
 Bonaventure.' 
 
 She sighed wearily. No kindness of speech could reconcile 
 her to the burden of debt which she felt laid on her. She 
 knew she was all alone in the world and homeless, except so 
 far as this stranger's homo was momentarily hers, and she 
 shrank with horror from the memory of all she must _ have 
 owed to him during these weeks of sickness and semi-con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 Ho saw the pain and humiliation there were in her, and 
 rose to leave her in peace. 
 
 ' I will return whenever you wish mc, my dear,' he said, as 
 ho laid his hand on hers. ' For the rest, look on my house as 
 yours.' 
 
 She hesitated. 
 
 ' Wait,' she said faintly, ' I have so much I ought to tell 
 you.' 
 
 ' You can tell mo in your own time. I shall not leave 
 Paris, at least only for a day or so at a time. My uncle died a 
 few weeks ago, and many all'airs in conseq_uence keep me hero.
 
 OTHMAR. 171 
 
 Adieu, my dear : rest and recover. That is all you have to do 
 now.' 
 
 'But I have no right to be in your house, and you know that 
 the lady despised me ! ' she murmured with a painful agitation, 
 which said, without )nore words, how cruel a dilemma it seemed 
 to her in which her weakness and her helplessness had placed 
 her. 
 
 'You have every right,' said Othmar. 'And she would be 
 the first to say so. Do not hurt me by taking this kindly 
 chance which made us meet as a burden or an injury. I have 
 often thought of you since we parted that night upon your island 
 beach, and always with a deep regret that my wife had so fatally 
 influenced your life. Will you not believe how glad I am to 
 be able to do you any little service to help efface that wrong ? ' 
 
 He kissed in grave farewell her wasted hand, once so plump 
 and brown with youth and health, and the bronze from the sun 
 and tlie sea, and now so pale and fleshless. 
 
 She looked at him and stopped him with something of her 
 old pride and spirit in her face, as she said a little abruptly : 
 
 ' You remember you told me it would be mean not to tell 
 him where I had been that day ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, my poor child. I remember.' 
 
 ' I did tell him.' 
 
 * That was very brave of you and very noble. T fear my 
 advice cost you dear.' 
 
 A smile that was almost happy at his praise parted her lips 
 and showed her small white teeth. 
 
 ' Y''ou told me what was right,' she said. 'It would have 
 been cowardly to say nothing.' 
 
 ' It was very brave to say the truth. Y^ou shall tell me all 
 that happened from it on another day. I can never forgive my- 
 self for all the misery which my wife's thoughtless invitation has 
 ent.dled on you. Let me do my best to atone for it.' 
 
 Then he bowed low with unfeigned reverence, and left her. 
 What vras so worthy of reverence as so much innocence, as so 
 nmch courage \ 
 
 She drew a long sigh, and her eyes closed. She was tired 
 with the exhausted sense of failing powers which the feebleness 
 of illness causes after every slight exertion. But his visit had 
 left on her a deep, sweet sense of serenity and safety. 
 
 ' How good and great he is ! ' she said dreamily to the nun, 
 as the door closed on him. 
 
 The pious woman did not reply. Othmar was not her idea 
 of human excellence. He went to no church, and he supported 
 no religious institutions. Besides, as she thought to herself, 
 who could tell what motives he had in taking this handsome 
 child off the streets ? It was not her business to speak ; her 
 superiors had sent her there, and had said to her : ' Nurse the
 
 17-2 OTHMAR. 
 
 girl, and say nothing.' But the Sister had not gone on her 
 many errands of mercy for a score of years in all the quarters 
 of Paris, good and bad, rich and poor, without knowing the 
 meaning of human vices. She began to convey vague warnings, 
 and cite praiseworthy examples of temptation resisted and over- 
 come to her patient. Her voice went on and on unanswered, 
 like the flowing of a sloHiful brook, and when at last she looked 
 up from her embroidery, Damaris was asleep upon her couch, 
 the last red reflection from the sun, which luid set beyond the 
 trees of the gardens, tinging her face with its warmth, and her 
 hair with its light. For the first time since she had been 
 brought there her expression, as she slept, was one of peace. 
 
 But soon she woke again, startled and distressed. The 
 tears sprang to her eyes ; she pressed her hands together in 
 passionate agitation. 
 
 ' I spoke so badly ! ' she said, in great contrition. ' I said 
 such poor weak words ! He will never know all I feel. He 
 will only think me ungrateful ! ' 
 
 ' Tut, tut ! ' said the nun roughly. ' Take your gratitude 
 to God, not man ! ' 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 The following day he sent to ask if she would receive him 
 again ; it seemed to him that not to do so would be to appear to 
 neglect her. He did not misconstrue her few embarrassed 
 words or deem her thankless ; he had that intuition into the 
 minds of others which minds sensitive tliemselves possess ; he 
 understood all the conflicting emotions which had agitated her, 
 all the vast weight of gratitude which held her dumb and made 
 her almost mute, almost awkward in his presence. He paid 
 her a brief visit four or five times in that week, then was absent 
 himself at Amyot for a few days. On his return he saw her 
 again, and she seemed to have gained greatly in strength. She 
 could sit erect ; her face had the hues of returned health, and 
 her eyes met his with the candour and brightness which were 
 natural to her regard. She was a child still, and she had so 
 much trust in him that it supplied to her the place of friends 
 and liome. 
 
 If the memory of the great lady who had tempted her and 
 ridiculed her, and who was his wife, had not been too constantly 
 before her, she would have been almost happy again. But for 
 lier she had a sombre antagonism, a curious sentiment, half 
 defiance, lialf fear. Othniar never pressed her to tell him more 
 or sooner than she Avislu'd of nil the circumstances whicli had 
 led to his discovery of her on the bridge ; but one day when ho
 
 OTHMAR. 173 
 
 found her nearly well, standing by the open \vindows Avith the 
 breeze lifting the short thick waves of her hair, and her eyes 
 looking wistfully across the trees at the domes and roofs of 
 Pans, she turned and caught his hand in hers and laid her lips 
 on it. 
 
 ' What can I do ? How can I thank you ? A very dog 
 could do something to show you his gratitude, and I— I can do 
 nothing.' 
 
 * You have rewarded me by getting well,' said Othmar 
 kindly and lightly, to avoid the explosion of any stronger 
 emotions, ' and you can reward me more greatly if you will tell 
 me everything that has befallen you since I took you home 
 that night. Will you 1 ' 
 
 ' It will not tire you ] ' 
 
 ' It will interest me greatly.' 
 
 She sat down, the full afternoon sun falling on her face as 
 it was upraised to him, her hands locked in her lap, her face 
 pensive and grave wath many memories. 
 
 ' When I told him the truth that night,' she began, ' he hurt 
 me a good deal, but more in my heart than in my body. I 
 suppose he did not believe that I had done nothing wrong ; 
 anyhow, in going to your house I had disobeyed him. In the 
 morning he took me to the mainland and my clothes with me, 
 and without speaking ever a word, drove me in different 
 vehicles up, up, up into the interior where the hills were, and 
 placed me in a convent of Benedictine nuns up in the mountains 
 above Val de Nieve. There he left me without saying a word 
 to me, though I suppose he explained tilings to the Sisters, 
 Perhaps he told them I was wicked, for they were very harsh to 
 me, and their discipline was very severe. It was exceedingly 
 cold there after the island, Avhich you know is so warm, and for 
 months there was snow all around, nothing but snow. I felt 
 like a chained dog, and I fretted and raged, and they punished 
 me. It was very miserable. Twice I tried to run away, but 
 they prevented me. Then the better weather came and the 
 very mountains grew green and bore flowers. This gave me a 
 kind of hopefulness, and there were a number of little children 
 in the convent, and I played with them and became less wret- 
 ched, and I learned many things, for the Sisters were instructed 
 women and taught well, and 1 had always been fond of books 
 and eager to read them. But how I longed for the sea, and to 
 feel a boat bound under me, and go as I chose it to go ! You 
 see I had always been in the open air and on the open sea at my 
 fancy, and that is no doubt why I felt like a chained dog in 
 these stone chambers, with their iron bars and their windows so 
 high that one could only see a hand's-breadth of skj'. Why do 
 people live so when there is the air and the earth and the 
 •water ? I was there half a year, or rather more. Then in the
 
 174 OTHMAR. 
 
 month of October my grandfather came, just before the passes 
 in the mountains were closed with snow, and took me back to 
 Bonaventure. ' 
 
 Her eyes closed a moment as if to keej) in unshed tears. 
 Then she resumed her story. 
 
 ' He never addressed me except just about things which he 
 could not help, and we crossed the sea and landed at the dear 
 island, and I thought the dogs would have gone mad with joy. 
 Catherine had died whilst I was at the convent, and he had 
 never allowed me to be told. That she should have died in my 
 absence was a great pain to me, because I had known her all my 
 life, and she had been often kind and good though her temper 
 was cross, above all on washing and baking days. But now slie 
 was gone, poor soul ! Everything else, however, was as I had 
 always known it, and I was so happy to be home I could have 
 kissed all the inanimate things ! The goats knew me, too, and 
 one of the hens flew to my shoulder directly. My grandfather 
 let me do whatever I liked aU that day, but he never spoke once 
 except to bid me eat and drink. When it was night and I was 
 about to go to bed, for I felt tired, he took me out under the 
 orange-trees ; it was a fine night and the air very light and 
 clear, and there was a moon then coming up above the edge of 
 the sea. There he said to me that if I would marry my cousin 
 he would give me the whole island all for my own, and to my 
 cousin the brig and all the money that was saved, and he him- 
 self would only keep a room or two and enough for his wants, 
 and my cousin was to take the name of Berarde. I thanked 
 him, but I said I would not marry my cousin. I might have 
 done if your Lady had never come to me that day, perhaps ; I 
 do not know. I said a score of times that I would not ; each 
 time I was more resolved than before. Then my grandfather 
 grew like a madman and cursed me horribly, and told me that 
 I had no claim on him ; that my father had never married my 
 mother, that the law would allot me nothing. 1 do not very 
 well understand how, but it seems that I had no legal right 
 there, and that all he had done for me he had done to please my 
 uncle Jules, the one who died of cholera, who had loved my 
 father and so loved me. Now, perhaps, as all my life had been 
 a burden to him and a debt, 1 ought to have obeyed him and 
 married Louis Boze. Do you think so % ' 
 
 'No,' said Othmar, with some vehemence. 'No; such a 
 marriage would have been a blasyihenij^ ! ' 
 
 ' I did not stay to think, I did not want to think. I said 
 no — no — no — a thousand times no ! And then I thought he 
 Avould have beaten me as he beat me the night you took mo 
 home.' 
 
 'Beat you? Good God !' 
 
 * Ho had beaten me before when he was in dritvlc, never at
 
 OTHMAR. 175 
 
 any other time. This night he had not drunk. He '^-as quite 
 sober, but he became mad witli rage ; it was always so Avith liim 
 at any opposition, and he had thought that I should be dull and 
 tame, having been so long in the convent. But I was not. I 
 told him that I would obey him and Avork for him as long as 
 he lived, because I owed him everything I had ever owned or 
 enjoyed ; that I would be his servant, and till the ground, and 
 sail the boat, and fish in the sea, and cut wood, and do all that 
 Raphael did ; but that I would never marry my cousin or any- 
 one else. Never — never. So 1 told him as we stood mider 
 the moon together.' 
 
 ' But, before we saw you, you were willing to make this 
 marriage % ' 
 
 Damaris coloured more. 
 
 ' I had never thought about it before then. My grandfather 
 said it was to be. It was to me as when he said so many 
 thousand oranges were to be packed, or so many barrels of oil 
 sent to the mainland. I never thought about it. But after — 
 after I had seen your wife, and your house, and your friends, 
 then, I do not know why, but everything seemed cliflFerent.' 
 
 If his wife had not gone to the island in that hour of caprice, 
 this child would no doubt have accej^ted the fate prepared for 
 her, and passed her life as so many other women did, mated to 
 a boor but reconciled by habit to uncongenial companionship, 
 putting aside her dreams with the orange-flowers of her bridal 
 clothes, and learning to think only of the gold pieces in the 
 bank, the yield of the oil-presses, the price of fish and of fruit, 
 the growth of the children that with each year came to birth. 
 Would it not have been better 1 Common sense and vulgar 
 j)rudence would say yes, he knew, but in his inmost soul he 
 could not say it. Besides, revolt might have come, disgust, the 
 desire for wider worlds and higher thoughts and warmer 
 passions. 
 
 With her luminous eyes and her poet's thoughts she would 
 have never been contented long with the narrow, coarse, dull 
 ways of such a life as would have been hers had she yielded. 
 
 ' Poor child ! ' thought Othuiar, with a pang of almost per- 
 sonal repentance. 
 
 Nadege had done many things Avhich Avere as so much mere 
 thistle-down on the wind in her own eyes, but which had sown 
 dragon's teeth in the paths of others. But it seemed to him 
 that she had never done a more unkind or a more wanton act 
 than when, on the spur of an idle moment's caprice, she had 
 tempted this innocent Alcina from her happy island of con- 
 tent. 
 
 Damaris did not say so, but he himself had haunted her 
 dreams ever since that night's sail over the moonlit sea. 
 
 This man, with his gentle courtesies, his low .soft voice, his
 
 17(5 OTHMAR. 
 
 tendei- care and compassion for her, his higli romantic sense 
 of lionoLir which Iiad made him comisel lior to tell the truth, 
 cost what it would, seemed to her a being of another world 
 than that to which her grandfather and her affianced lord 
 belonged. 
 
 She had thought of little else but Othmar ever since he had 
 left her on that shore in the soft-tinted shadow, where the light 
 of daybreak crossed the last rays of the moon. It was not love 
 which she felt ; he was too far away from her, too impersonal, 
 too great for her to think of him with any personal thoughts ; 
 but it was an idealised admiration, a keenly grateful remem- 
 brance, a vague, unconscious sympathy, which had filled her 
 mind with his image in the many lonely hours she had passed 
 since that night, and the remembrance of him had made her 
 shrink from the possible contact, from the mere thought of her 
 cousin, with a disgust and a revolt which had made her as un- 
 moved as the rocks of her island itself, before the rage of her 
 tyrant and the threats of his blind passion. 
 
 A thousand times better death, she had said to herself^ 
 death under the blue waters on the deep sea bottom of her native 
 gulf ; death and peace and silence amongst the broad green 
 weed and the jewelled fishes and the white coral branches which 
 she had seen so often, fathoms down below her, as she had 
 leaned over the boat's side and gazed through the pellucid water 
 clear as a mirror to her eyes. 
 
 Startled, she was recalled to the present by the voice of 
 Othmar, as he asked her to continue her narrative. 
 
 ' I tht)ught I was on the island ! ' she said with a sigh. 
 'Would you like to go back tlierel' he asked. A vague, 
 wild fancy came to him of buying back her lost paradise for^her 
 at any cost. She hesitated. 
 
 ' It would not be the same,' she said at last. ' I should not 
 be the same, you know. But sometimes I want the sea so much ! 
 I want the sight of it, the scent of it, the feel of the wind from 
 it blowing on my face ! He was very cruel, but, I suppose, ho 
 could not help it. He was disappointed in me, and that made 
 him very luuxl. When he found that he could not force me to 
 marry my cousin he became quite mad. He took me down to 
 the water, and put me in one of the small boats, and he told me 
 to go, just as I was, with nothing but the clothes I had on and 
 the gold cross Monsignor gave me at my first couununion, Avhich 
 I always wore at my throat, nnd a few tvii^kets which had be- 
 longed to my mother. He ordered me to row away or he would 
 fire upon me.' 
 
 ' Good God, what a brute ! ' cried Othmar. 
 'lam sure he did not intend to really hurt me,' she said 
 earnestly. ' I am sure he only meant to friglitun me, and thought 
 I should go back to him and do what he wished me to do. Ho
 
 OTHMAR. 177 
 
 never supposed, I dare say, that I sliould take liiin at his word 
 and go.' 
 
 ' Few of your age and sex woukl have had the courage to 
 do so.' 
 
 A look of contempt passed over her face. 
 
 ' I ■would have given myself to the sliarks sooner than return 
 jind give in. One must be a very weak creature to be driven 
 Hke that.' 
 
 ' Why did you not come to us ?' 
 
 ' I could not liave done that.' 
 
 'Why ? We were absent, but if you had gone to the house 
 there and written to me — or to my wife.' 
 
 ' No. I could not have done that. When I was there I was 
 a burden to her. Besides, you had no right to do anything for 
 me. You were a stranger.' 
 
 ' I had the right I liave now — that of a friend. You were 
 ill treated in my house, that I knov>^, but it was no fai;lt of 
 mine.' 
 
 ' It was no one's fault. Only my own, for being foolish 
 enough to go there. But let me tell you the rest as quickly as 
 I can, or you will be tired ' 
 
 The colour rose over her face, and her voice grew lower, and 
 her words more rapid as she hastened on the course of her 
 narrative. 
 
 ' I knew he would do as he said, fi>r he stood above with his 
 musket levelled downward at me. I took up the oars and I 
 rowed away from the island, steering with my foot. I felt 
 quite stunned ; I did not think of resisting : when once he said 
 I was nothing to him, and ought not really to bear his name, I 
 did not feel as if I had any business there ever any more. Only 
 I could not understand it, because after all he said that I was 
 his son's chikl ; and I have been all the days of my life on tlie 
 island, and I thought my heart would break. Well — I got into 
 the boat. It was quite liglit because the moon was now at tlie 
 full. The sea was still. I did not feel in any way afraid. Yet 
 I had never felt the sea so solitary as it seemed that niglit. Far 
 away tliere were the lights of steamers moving steadily. I could 
 smell the smell from tlie orange trees for a long, long while, and 
 the last sound I heard from home was the cry of Clovis. He 
 was howlini' because I was gone ' 
 
 Tears choked her voice ; but slie only paused a moment. 
 
 ' Of course,' she continued, ' I had never been alone at sea 
 in the night time before. One feels so small, so weak, so very 
 lonely, all by oneself between the water and the sky. I was 
 afraid, but I was not frightened. Do you know what I mean / 
 I mean that I was not a coward, but I felt very near death. 
 The boat was so small, and the sea was so large. It had never 
 seemed so large to me before. Well, I could steer by this com-
 
 I7S OTHMAR. 
 
 l^ass you gave me, which I had never let anyone see lest tliey 
 should take it ; and the wind was southerly and drove me north- 
 ward. 
 
 ' After many hours, and when my arms were veiy tired, and 
 the day was breaking, 1 came to the coast. 
 
 ' I landed at St. Jean ; no one saw me land, and I avoided 
 the fisher-people whom I knew there, because I could not bear 
 to tell them how n)y grandfather had dealt witli me. There 
 were a few of them on the beach, getting their cobles ready to 
 go out, but it was only dawn, and I did not let the few there 
 were astir see me. I left the boat tied to some piles and went 
 inland. I have never seen tlie sea since ! ' 
 
 There was a great regret and longing in her voice. 
 
 'I did not like to stop anywhere on the coast, for there 
 were many people there who knew me ; and I was sure they 
 would ask me so many questions. I drank some water at a 
 well ; I was not hungry. I dare say you will wonder that 
 I did not feel afraid, but I did not. I went out of the town 
 on the northern road ; I wished to get to Grasse and so to 
 Paris. 
 
 ' I had not gone very far before I met a Brigasque woman 
 mounted on a mule. I knew her as a friend of Catherine's. 
 She was well-to-do, and owned a flower-farm not far from St. 
 Dalmas de Tende ; she grew common plants for tlie perfume 
 distillers of Grasse. She thought I had run away from the 
 island, and I let her tliink so ; and as she hated my grandfather, 
 because he had outbidden her years before at the sale by auction 
 of some acres of land in the lloya valley, she offered me to go 
 home with her and work for her amongst the flowers. As I did 
 not know what to do or where to sleep I accepted her offer, and 
 she hired a mule for me at the next inn we came to, and so I 
 rode with her into the Brigasque country, which I did not know 
 at all, but which I found was very pretty and had more trees in 
 it than usual. I stayed with her all the winter, helj^ing her in 
 what ways that I could. 
 
 ' I passed tlie winter there, for I knew I must not go to 
 Paris without some little money at least. One day in the new 
 year there came by a pedlar whom I knew ; we had bought little 
 objects of him once or twice, when Catherine and I had been at 
 St. Jean at the same time as he. He recoarnised me at once and 
 roughly called me a fool, for he said that my grandfather had 
 died of apoplexy straining at the oil-press one day, in place of a 
 bullock which had dropped at the work. He called me a fool, 
 because he said if T had not run away I should have now in- 
 herited the island and all he had, whereas it was now left uncon- 
 ditionally to Louis Roze. 1 did not tell him that I had not run 
 away.' 
 
 •Jn what little things,' thought Othmar as he listened, *a
 
 OTHMAR 179 
 
 high and genorons nature shows itself, quite unwitting how it 
 innocently displays its own fine instincts ! ' 
 
 ' Did you not tell him of your wrongs then % ' he asked 
 aloud. 
 
 ' Oh no : not when my grandfather was dead and could not 
 defend himself ! To me it was the end of all hope. I had 
 hoped that one day I should go home. I had always thought 
 he would relent and seek me out ; it made me miserable to thuik 
 that he should have said such cruel words to me for the last 
 words, and he had certainly been good to me, very good in his 
 "way. He could not be veiy gentle, it was not in him ; but he 
 had been generous to me, and sometimes kind and quite proud 
 of me too. I was very sorry, because when a person is dead, 
 you know, one only remembers what was good in them, and one 
 wants so much to say so many, many things to them ; but now 
 I knew that this could never be, and I was very wretched. The 
 pedlar had said that everything was given to my cousin, but the 
 people I was with would not believe it. They got a letter 
 written to my cousin, and asked for my share (unknoAvn to me ; 
 I would not have let them do it had I known). Louis Roze 
 wrote back to them that I inherited nothing under the will, and 
 had no legal claim to insist on any division of the property ; he 
 said he was about to marry a young woman of St. Tropez, and 
 he sent me a bank note for a thousand francs. I sealed it up 
 and sent it back to him. You know he knew that all the island 
 would have been mine. I care nothing for the money, but I 
 love the island ; I love every stick and stone upon it, every shell 
 on its sand, every wave that breaks on its rocks ! ' 
 
 ' You shall have your island again, if money can buy it ! ' 
 thought Othmar, with one of those heedless impulses of gene- 
 rosity which had more than once cost him dear. 
 
 ' I was so unhappy to think my grandfather was dead, and 
 dead with rage in his heart against me, that for weeks I could 
 do nothing,' she pursued, while the tears rolled off her lashes. 
 ' But then I felt that there was no one on earth to do anything 
 for me if I did not do it for myseK, and I worked hard to get 
 together money enough to take me to Paris, and keep me there 
 a little while. They all said that life there was very dear, and 
 money ran like water. You see I was always thinking of what 
 your Lady had said, about my having some talent in me. 1 
 thought of it all day long as I worked in the rose-fields and 
 among the great thickets of jessamine. Your Lady had said 
 that I might be great some day, and it is always to Paris that 
 people go who wish to be great, at least all the books say so. 
 \Vatteau went, and Moliere, and Rousseau, and Napoleon, and 
 ever so many others ' 
 
 * Ah, poison of the world !' thought Othmar. 'What cruelty 
 we did ! She would have stayed on her island and been the
 
 iSo OTIIMAR. 
 
 mother of little brown children, and known nothing of the 
 world but its fresh honest sea and its frank, bold winds ! What 
 a pity ! What a pity ! The rattlesnake is kinder than such 
 dreams of fame ! ' 
 
 He Avas sorry and troubled, and angered against his wife, 
 who had cast the stone of worldly desire into the limpid, calm 
 waters of this young child's thoughts. 
 
 He was unspeakably saddened liy the vision of her, coming 
 northward over the sandy roads of Provence, with so much hope 
 and fancy in her heart, only to drop sick with hunger upon the 
 stones of Paris — Paris, so fair a mistress to the rich, so hard a 
 stepmother to the poor. Gilbert, and Hege'sippe Moreau, and 
 Meryon, and how many others, had traversed that path before 
 her, only to perish in the hospital or the garret, mad or famished, 
 clutching at the bough of laurel, obtaining only the hemlock of 
 death ! 
 
 ' So I determined to leave St. Dalmas,' she continued, ' and 
 walk all the way to Grasse when the INIarch weather came. On 
 the roads I assure you I did quite well. People were very kind 
 whilst I was in my own country, as it were. At the bastidea 
 and the cottages they let me sleep well and gave me food, and 
 let me do work in return. I know how to do many things that 
 are of use on the farms, but of no use at all in Paris. So little by 
 little I did get to Grasse, and there one of the women who knew 
 my Brigasque friends gave me welcome, because some of them 
 had given me a letter to her asking her to be kind. But I shall 
 weary you ; I Avill try to tell the rest shortly. I could have 
 stayed on at Grasse as long as I would, but I wanted to get to 
 Paris ; above all, now that my grandfather was dead, there was 
 nothing to keep me in my own country ; no one wanted me or 
 sought for me. They had paid me a little for what I did in the 
 Brigasque country, and I saved up all of it, and Avhen I had 
 enough to pay for the raihvay to take me there (it is very dear 
 indeed), I bade them farewell and took the train to Paris. I 
 had never ti'avelled by land before, only on the dear sea. It is 
 horrible to have all that lire in that great iron pot swinging one 
 to and fro, while it yells and bellows through the lieat and the 
 air that is not like air at all but only so much smoke. How 
 Fenelon would have hated it ; it would have seemed to him like 
 hell ! Why do men travel in such a way when there arc the 
 tree-shad(>wed roads and the rivers ? I had taken my passage 
 (do they call it so ?) straightway to Paris, and there were many 
 changes and many pauses and great confusion, and the noise and 
 the heat and the strangeness made me feel unwell. I had never 
 felt ill before, that I remember. It was a very great many hours, 
 even days I think, before we reached Paris ; it was night, and it 
 ■was raining ; nothing was at all like Avhat I had pictured it. 
 There were crowds and crowds of people, but no one noticed
 
 OTIDfAR. i8i 
 
 me. I felt lonely, and I missed tlie sea and the sweet fresh 
 smell that is anywhere where the conntry is. Here the air felt 
 so thick and so greasy, and the rain had no pleasantness in it ; it 
 was not clean and fragrant, as it is when it scours over the fields 
 or patters through the orange-leaves at home. As I came out of 
 the station a young man looked into my face and was insolent. 
 I struck him a blow on his cheek with all my might ; I hurt 
 him ; the people wanted to sei^e me, but I was quicker than 
 they, and I ran, and ran, and ran until I outstripped them, and 
 then I was in a narrow, dai'k street, and sat down on a doorstep 
 and wondered wliere I ought to go. I had only three gold 
 pieces with me in a belt round my waist, and I knew they would 
 not last long. I had spent almost as much as that for the train 
 and in food at the places the train waited at ; the food was very 
 dear and very bad, even the bread. 
 
 ' Some women went by and spoke to me, but I did not like 
 their words, and I answered nothing, but got up and looked 
 about me for a place to sleep in. I was wet through, for it 
 rained a great deal. I saw a little place which seemed like a 
 restaurant, and I went in and asked if I could have a room 
 there. They gave me one, a very little one, and not clean, and I 
 went to bed without eating, being afraid to spend the little I had. 
 
 'When I got up in the morning and went to jsay for my 
 chamber and supper, I found that I had no money at all. My 
 belt was gone. I suppose I had been so sound asleep that I 
 never heard them come into my room and take it. I always 
 think it was the woman of the house who stole it, because I had 
 shown her the napoleons. She raved and abused me when I told 
 her my money had been stolen, and said her house had always 
 been honest. She denied that she had ever seen the belt, and 
 swore that I should pay for all 1 had or go to prison. I told her 
 that it was she was the thief, not I. I threw her my little gold 
 cross to pay her, and went out of her house into the streets. 1 
 think she was a wicked woman.' 
 
 'Wicked, indeed,' said Othmar, whilst he thought, 'it is 
 heaven's mercy that she did not do worse to you.' 
 
 He, by whom all the hideous vice of the great city was known, 
 all its grasping greed, its hunger for gold, its remorseless seizure 
 of all ignorance, ancl innocence, and pleasant rural things, and 
 virgin beauty of the body and the mind, knew that by a mii'acle 
 scarce less than that which in legend bears the royal saint of 
 Alsace unharmed through the ilames liad this child escaped 
 pollution in the heart of Paris. Corruption had been all around 
 her, and the morass of iniquity upon every side ; her own sex 
 were for ever on the watch for such as she, to sell their youth 
 into the slavery of the brothel, and she had known no more the 
 peril which she ran than the wild dove does when its flying 
 ehadow passes over the trap hung below it in the oak-boughs.
 
 i82 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' I fiskecl in a great many places for such work as I knew 
 liow to do, but nolDody wanted any of it done. There seemed 
 such numbers of peojile cverywliero ckitching at every little bit 
 of work. IMany laughed at me : I saw my clothes were different 
 to what they wore in Paris, and my accent was difl'erent too to 
 theirs. But they were cruel to laugh. I went to the theati-es 
 and tried to see the directors, but no one of them would even 
 f5ee me. All these days I lived on the little money I had gained 
 by selling my great cloak ; it was such warm weather I did not 
 want it. I had made acquaintance with a good woman who was 
 very poor herself, but she told me what to do and where to go, 
 and let me sleep in her one little attic ; she had three children, 
 quite little ones, and she worked in a match factory. She lives 
 in a little passage up at Montmartre. Of course I had to make 
 her think I ate all I wanted out of doors or she Avould have 
 robbed hei'self for me, poor though she was. I had a friend in 
 her, but when I had been with her three weeks, there was a 
 noisy mob which assembled near, and screamed for bread, and 
 broke open the bakers' shops and stole the loaves. She was 
 coming home from the factory, and was arrested as one of the 
 rioters, though I am sure she had been merelj' passing down the 
 street, and the little children had no one but me for a little 
 while. I did what I could for tliem until their grandmother 
 came up from some village outside the barrier and took them 
 away, and I missed them verj'- much. 
 
 ' I would rather not talk about the days that came after that 
 dreadful morning,' she pursued, the wavering colour fading 
 wdioUy from her face, for the recollection of them was unbear- 
 able to her. ' It is only three months ago since I came to Paris, 
 but it seems as if it were years. I saw and heard things that I 
 could never tell anyone, they were so horrible. I sold all I 
 had of clothes, it was very little. I lived as I could, I was very 
 hungry all the time, but I did not mind that so much as I minded 
 the squalor, the noise, the crowds, the filthy smells, the horrible 
 language. I tried to get work, but I could not. I went to the 
 theatre doors, but the porters would not let me in. I did not 
 know what to do ; even my linen was sold. I sold even my 
 shoes, and people give you so little when they know that you 
 want much. I could not get any work of any kind. I was of use 
 on my island, but not liere ; and the men jeered at me and were 
 rude — and — and — there is nothing more to tell that I know. I 
 could make no money at all, and so of late I could get no food, 
 and the night I fell down on the bridge I was faint and very 
 unhappy, for they had tiu'iicd me out of the woman's room 
 because she did not come back, and I had no money to pay for 
 keeping it. But that is enough about me. I met you on the 
 bridge. You know the rest. I had not eaten anything all tlio 
 day, I supiiose that was why I fainteJ. I never fainted in my
 
 OTHMAR. I S3 
 
 life before. It is only three months since I left Grasse, but it 
 seems so many years — so many years ! Is this the world indeed 
 that the Comtesse Othmar spoke of ? Surely it cannot be— it is 
 cruel, it is hideous, it is hateful — if I could only see the sea or 
 the country once more ! You have been very good to me. I 
 pray you to help me to gain my own living somehow, only not 
 in this city — pray not here ! I am stifled in it. I want the ail*. 
 Pray help me ! ' 
 
 Othmar was silent from emotion. It seemed unutterably 
 cruel to him that this child should have been led into such jierils, 
 such pain, such want, by one careless word of his wife's, and he, 
 who all his life long had had about him everything that luxury 
 can invent and comfort demand shuddered at the thought of lier 
 suflcring and her exposure, as though he had seen his own little 
 daughter naked and shivering in the snows and the winds of a 
 winter's night. 
 
 When ho left her presence that day he could think of 
 nothing but her piteous story. The heroic courage of the 
 young girl, the noble qualities she had all unconsciously 
 revealed in the course of its narration, the utter friendlessncss 
 of her position, and the fearless frankness of her confidence in 
 himself, all touched his heart closely. It seemed horrible to 
 him that any woman-child should suffer so much and be sur- 
 rounded with such cruel perils. Those days in Paris had done 
 the work of years upon this innocent creature, who had before 
 only known the freshness of sea and shore, the safety of a 
 sheltered youth, the dauntless gaiety of a buoyant and un- 
 checked spirit ; but he saw that all through it, through all its 
 miseries and all its temptations, she had kejjt her soul unhurt. 
 He dared not ask her how she had done so, but he knew that 
 she had defended herself safely from all foul contact, and again 
 it seemed to him a miracle great as that which guides the 
 swallow over desert and ocean back to its last year's nest. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 Othmar was naturally of a tender and even enthusiastic nature. 
 His sympathies were warm and spontaneous, his imagination 
 was strong and governed his reason very often. There was 
 much in the circumstances of this poor child which appealed 
 both to tenderness and imagination, and he Avas haunted by her 
 swift mellow voice, with its meridional intonations, her great 
 dark luminous eyes filling with sudden tears as she remembered 
 her island home. 
 
 He felt that they owed her a debt. They had robbed her of 
 her birthright of simple joys and honest, obscure, healthful
 
 i84 OTHMAR. 
 
 ways of life. Tliey could never again make her what they had 
 found her. Who can put back the gathered rosebud on the 
 rose-bough ? 
 
 They had a right to give her what they could give in lieu of 
 all which she had lost, indirectly but indisiuitably, through 
 their means. His conscience, as well as his common sense, 
 told him tliat as his wife had been the chief offender against tlie 
 child's peace, so she had the hrst right to know the results of 
 her interference, and amend them. But he had the moral 
 timidity of proud, reticent, and sensitive natures : he dreaded 
 her iron}' and her indifference. He could not tell what she 
 would say or do ; possibly in the end something which he would 
 approve ; but he knew that first of all she would ridicule liim : 
 witli her lips ceitainly, very likely even in her thoughts. Even 
 when he had been her lover she had always laughed at him for 
 taking life so seriously, for being E,uy iilas and Holla rather 
 than Sir Harry Wildair. And even if she were moved to any 
 kindness, how likely would her languid, haughty footsteps tread 
 hurtfully, without knowing or heeding it, on the storm-tossed 
 wild flower? She could be exquisitely kind, magnificently 
 generous ; none more so : but was it not, alas ! only while her 
 mood to be so lasted % 
 
 ' I will tell her — latei',' he said, Avith that temporising before 
 difficulty which many a man, bold and even rash in his dealings 
 with his fellow-men, is apt to adopt when he deals with 
 women. 
 
 Meanwhile, something had to be done at once, he knew, to 
 reconcile Damaris to her dependence upon himself. He knew 
 she was of the temper which would break loose from the safest 
 shelter and rush to the direst danger if she deemed herself 
 humiliated by assistance. In all her grace of youth and heljj- 
 lessness of circumstance, there was still something warm, strong, 
 untameable in her, which he felt as the hand which holds a 
 bird will feel its Avings stir and tremble ready to fly. It would, 
 lie knew, be hard to aid her. It would have to be done in her 
 own despite. 
 
 A thought occurred to him ; one of those spontaneous ideas 
 which come to us like very angels, and Avhich, in after years, 
 seem rather born of hell than heaven. On it he spoke to her 
 the next day. 
 
 'Tell mc, my dear — your grandfather died after you had 
 left the island some months / Well, did y<iu never hear any 
 details of his death or of his Avill? You know only Avhat the 
 pedlar said ? ' 
 
 'Only tliat.' 
 
 ' Then I think you shoidd know more. He may have 
 repented him of his cruelty, or he may have made some sort of 
 bequest to you, even if tlie bulk of what he had has gone to
 
 OTH^TAR. i?S 
 
 your cousin. My people there could soon inquire. Will you 
 allow me to do that % ' 
 
 ' If you wish. But I am certain he left me nothing — never 
 thought of me. You did not know him : once he had put any 
 person out of his heart, it was to him as if they never had lived 
 at all. He was very hard, and he never by any chance forgave. 
 Beside^he told me — I had no claim on him, was nothing to 
 him.' 
 
 ' Legally. But sixteen years of life spent beside him could 
 scarcely pass utterly out of his memory. If he had left you 
 anything, it is possible your cousin was not honest enough to 
 say so. I will inquire at any rate. It will be more satisfaction 
 to you to know more definite tidings than the hawker could 
 possibly give you.' 
 
 'I am sure he left me nothing. But I should be glad to 
 hear of Raphael and the dogs.' 
 
 ' You shall hear. Ilaphael, I have no doubt, will be as 
 glad to hear of you. Meanwhile be sure that both my wife and 
 I should be unhappy if j'ou Hed away from our roof out into the 
 world again. The world is not a kind place or a safe place, my 
 dear, for those who are young and motherless.' 
 
 'But I must do something,' she repeated feverishly. '1 
 must do something. I cannot live on your charity. I would 
 die sooner ! ' 
 
 ' I tell you I do not like the word of " charity," ' said Othmar. 
 'When people have all a common misfortune, they have as it 
 were a common tie. AVe have all the misft>rtune, the supreme 
 misfortune, of human life.' 
 
 Even absorbed as she was in her own great straits and needs, 
 Damaris was astonished at such words from one who, it seemed 
 to her, was at the very sunnnit of all earthly happiness. 
 
 ' If he be not content, who can be % ' she th(jught. 
 
 'It is a tie,' continued he, unconscious of her surprise, 
 ' which binds us all together. No one is so fortunate that he 
 may not live to want aid and pity. It is not so very many years 
 ago, as the lives of nations count, that here in Paris a king and 
 queen became so friendless that none dare say a kind adieu to 
 them as they went to their deaths upon the scati'old. Conqjared 
 to Marie Antoinette, how rich you are ! You have youth, 
 talents, friends, and all your future.' 
 
 ' I have no friends,' said Damaris, with a gloomy rejection 
 of all solace. 
 
 ' You have one at least,' said Othmar. 'You are a little in 
 love with sorrow, my dear ; all imaginative youth is so. When 
 we have really had its actuality with us for awhile, we get to 
 hate it bittcily, and do all we can to forget its presence.' 
 
 She looked at him with wonder. 
 
 ' Have you over been unhajjpy \ ' she said incredulously ;
 
 iS6 OTIIMAR. 
 
 *\vitli all these beautiful places ? uifcli tliat beautiful lady ? with 
 all tlie world ? ' 
 
 ' One is never happy for more than a day,' said Othniar with 
 some impatience. ' One wants, one wishes, one desires, one 
 obtains, one regrets — there is the whole gamut of all liunian 
 notes. The scale no sooner ascends than it descends. Tlicre 
 is nothing happy except youth, which does not know that it is 
 so, and so goes through all the glories of its time ignorant, pur- 
 blind, longing to cease to be youth.' 
 
 ' I was quite happy on the island,' said Damaris wistfully. 
 
 'Then you were wiser than I ever was,' said Othmar, as he 
 thought with a sort of remorse of how this innocent animal 
 happiness, born of the waves, and the winds, and the svm, and 
 tlie blossoms, and tlie radiant joy of mere living, had been de- 
 stroyed by one breath and glimpse of the world, as a flower 
 withers up in a flame, as a bird drops dead in carbonised air. 
 Had they only let her alone, she would have been happy still. 
 
 ' Yes,' Damaris sighed, and her eyes had a weary, troubled, 
 introspective look. They saw the blue sea wasliing the face of 
 the clifls, the white dogs barking on the strip of yellow sand, 
 the steep path going up and up and up under the olive trees, 
 the old woman in her blue kirtlo and a grey hood coming from 
 out the groves of orange and of lemon, a saucejian freshly 
 scoured or linen freshly washed in her horny liands — had all 
 those familiar jjictures faded for ever from her siglit % 
 
 Bethune had said truly that to gather the rosebud is the act 
 of an instant, but what power in heaven or on earth shall put 
 the rosebud, once broken oft', back again upon the mother 
 plant? If by any force of will or of wealth they were to buy 
 back her island again for her, it v>'ould never be possible to give 
 her back with the solid soil, and the old house-roof, and the 
 fruitful trees of it, the old, sweet, happy ignorance and peace 
 of her childhood there. 
 
 ' She is not here ? ' she asked suddenly, as she roused herself 
 from her dream of her old home. 
 
 ' ]\Iy wife % ' he asked in some surprise. * No ; she is in 
 Hussia.' 
 
 ' She will despise me,' said Dama.ris, a dull red glow of sh;uno 
 mounting over her forehead. ' Will you tell her that I was 
 found in the streets ? ' 
 
 * Not if it pain you. But you mistake if you thinlc ' 
 
 * I slinuld hate her to know it,' said the girl under her breath. 
 * I wanted to become something very great ; sometliing that she 
 would hear of and come to see ; and then I should liavc said to 
 her : "Yes, it is I, madame, and you will not laugh at me any 
 more now." ' 
 
 ' She never laughed at you. She admired you, and predicted 
 a great future for you,' said Othmar with a little embarrassment,
 
 OTHMAR. 187 
 
 not knowing verywell how to speak of one so near to him to tin's 
 child, whose memory was so tenacious alike of benefits and 
 affronts. 
 
 ' Is this house hers ? ' asked Damaris. 
 ' Surely, my dear : what is mine is hers. 
 
 Her face darkened. 
 
 'I am well now,' she said abruptlj'. ' May I not go away? 
 I could get work, I think, in the gardens or on the river ; there 
 would be things I could do. I learnt something, too, at the 
 convent in the mountains ; not much, but something. Pray try 
 and get me work.' 
 
 ' Do not be in such haste,' said Otlimar. 'It sounds like a 
 reproach to me. You are most fully welcome, my chikl. I shall 
 always feel that we can never atone to you for being the cause, 
 however unconsciously, of the breaking up of your happy life. 
 Wait, at least, until I have made some inquiries into your grand- 
 father's death and testament. It may very well be that your 
 cousin took the occasion of your absence to help himself to more 
 than was his due.' 
 
 'I do not think so. Louis was an honest man.' 
 
 * If he be honest, inquiry will not hurt him.^ 
 
 He had resolved to go himself upon an errand which he had 
 resolved not to entrust to any of his agents, trustworthy though 
 many of them were. 
 
 In the warm August night he took the express train for the 
 south, and went across the country, golden with ripe corn and 
 green with vine-leaves, straightway to the sultry shores of the 
 south, deserted by their hosts of guests, and sweltering, baked 
 and white with dust, in the intense suns of the late summer 
 weather. 
 
 He went first to the seaport of St. Tropez, and made 
 inquiries in its dockyard and shipyard as to Louis Roze. He 
 found that the man had really inherited the possessions of his 
 uncle Be'rarde, had married a young woman of the town, and 
 was now living on the island of Bonaventure. So far the tale 
 told by the pedlar to Damaris had been true. An old man, an 
 owner of a coasting brig, Avho had done business with the Berardes 
 all his life, told him also of the manner of Jean Berarde's death, 
 and added, with regret, that the curmudgeon had left not a 
 penny to his granddaughter because she had refused to marry 
 her cousin; and added, further, that the poor child had gone no 
 one knew whither. It was a pity, the old man said regretfully, 
 for she had had a face and a voice that it did good to the souls 
 of men to see and to hear, and had been as active on the sea as 
 any curlew, and so handy with a boat, even in wild weather, 
 that it had been a pleasure to sail with her anywhere. 
 
 Asked as to whether she had truly no legal claim upon her 
 grandsire, the old skipper aftirmed that everybody had always
 
 iSS OTIIMAR. 
 
 known she was a liastard, except lierself ; but nobody Iiad ever 
 supposed it would make any diflerencc in her succession to 
 Brinaventurc. Louis Ro/.e had always known it, but had been 
 Avilling to marry her to prevent any division of the property. So 
 much he learned, sitting on the sea-wall of St. Tropez, and 
 letting the old master of the brig Tanl Muvssa ramble on at will 
 •with the sunbaked land behind them, and before them a sea, 
 tame as a plain, and oil-hke in the drowsy drought. 
 
 He knew who (Jtlmiar was, as did most people on those 
 shores, and readily told him all he knew, though silently 
 wondering wliy he was asked tliese questions. 
 
 Othmar slept tliat night at his own house, and on the 
 moiTow, ahno.st before tlic sun was up, took one of his own 
 sailing-boats, and, attended only by one man, crossed the well- 
 nigh motionless sea in the direction of Bonaventure. When the 
 isle rose in sight, lifting its green cone out of tiio waves in the 
 hot blue air, it was still early in the morning. As he went over 
 the smooth surface of the summer sea, skimmed by thousands 
 <if gulls and funned by languid fruit-scented breezes from the 
 land, his heart ached for the sea-born child shut away under the 
 zinc roofs and gilded vanes of Paris. Even if he could buy 
 back her island, who could make her quite what she had been I 
 He was angered against his wife, who, for sake of an absurd 
 caprice, which had had no more duration in it than the light of 
 a Avax match, had brought about so sad an exile, so utter an 
 uprooting and alteration of a simple and a happy life. 
 
 He, like many men of high position, deemed a lowly fate by 
 far the hapi)iest ; he would have agreed with Cowley and George 
 Herbert, and would have chidden Herrick for not being ccmtent 
 amidst his Devon moors and streams, his cherry trees and roses. 
 
 Health, peace, and fresh air seemed to him three treasures 
 which were ill exclianged for the feverish struggle and the 
 artihcial joys of life in the cities of the world. 
 
 When they neared the island they saw no one. The boat 
 was easily run up on to the smooth strip of beach, and he 
 ascended the i^^'^^f^yclle and the steps cut in the rock, as Loris 
 Loswa had done before him once and Damaris a thousand 
 times. 
 
 Things were all changed upon the little isle. Catherine, 
 dead, had left no succcfscu- so thrifty and sturdy as herself ; tlie 
 man Raphael had gone witli all his family to live at Vallauris ; 
 I'ouis Roze and his wife had new faces, new ways, new things 
 about them. The dogs wei'e chained up ; the old coble was 
 newly painted ; Ihe little balcnny had a dalxif gilding, tricolour 
 paint, and some smf)king cliairs ; the great white rose had been 
 cut down, the new owners had thought it harboured caterpillars 
 and slugs. Nature had m;ule the place lovely, and even man, 
 the universal deformer and destroyer, could not nudve it wholly
 
 OTHMAR. iSj 
 
 otlievwise. But it had lost its look of freshness and hixnriance, 
 and all its deep cliarui of solitTide ; it was choked up with vulgar 
 furniture and gewgaws tliat the bride tliought hue and rai'e. 
 ]\Iodern china stood upon the shelves, and in the old solid silver 
 pots artificial flowers were stuck. Some maidens, with luany 
 coloui's in tlieir gowns and great ear-rings in their ears, cackled 
 and giggled behind the orange trees. It had been an idyl of 
 George Sand's ; it was now a rustic scene for an operetta or 
 Ofienbach's. 
 
 All that could not be vulgarised was the pure air, rich with 
 the odour of millions of orange-blossoms, and the serene far- 
 stretching sea, blue as the mouse-ear growing by a woodland 
 brook. 
 
 Louis Roze in his shirt-sleeves, smoking beside the door, was 
 a big, burly, red-faced man, with ear-rings also in his ears, and 
 the broad roll of the southern accent in his thick voice ; his 
 wife was a buxom, brown, stout, and vulgar woman of four- or 
 tive-and-twenty. They did not know Otlimar by sight, and ho 
 did not make himself known to them. He gave them an order 
 for a boat in the name of one of his own yacht-builders ; an 
 order large enough to open tlie heart of the boat-builder of St. 
 Tropez. Then by casual questions, and by letting the owner of 
 Bonaventure talk on and boast of his possessions, he learned 
 what he wanted to know : the facts of the elder Bcrarde's death, 
 and of the amount which had been bequeathed to his nephew. 
 
 ' He left everything he had on earth to me ; he knew in 
 Avhose hands it would prosper and increase,' said in conclusion 
 the big, oily-tongued, boastful Provencal. 
 
 ' Had he no other heirs at all \ ' asked Othmar, ' or was it 
 your uncle's very natural preference for yourself % ' 
 
 'None on earth,' said the man hastily, with a little added 
 red on his red cheeks, and a quick glance of his eye. 
 
 ' Who was the girl, then,' asked his guest, ' who used to live 
 with him, and go out in his brig ]' 
 
 ' She was nothiug at all to Berarde,' said Louis Roze sullenly, 
 beginning to perceive that he had been interrogated with a 
 purpose. 
 
 ' A bastard ! ' he added. ' The law d<jes not recognise 
 bastards.' 
 
 ' The law, like proverbs, is the distilled wisdom of man- 
 kind,' said Othmar. ' Like proverbs also, it occasionally may 
 be caught tripping in its wisdom.' 
 
 The man eyed him uneasily. 
 
 ' She was a bastard,' he said again. ' I did generously by 
 her, because after all blood is blood. I sent her a handsomo 
 dowry ; big enough to get her a good spouse amongst better 
 men than she had any right to look for : — ' 
 
 lie felt angry and battled, and would have been quarrelsome
 
 1 90 O Til MAR. 
 
 and have told his visitant to mind his own business, only that 
 he saw the unbidden guest was a gentleman, and the order for 
 the craft had made him patient and obsequions. 
 
 Othmar looked at him with some disgust, changed his tone, 
 and addressed him witli more severity. 
 
 ' M. Louis Roze, it is no concern of mine you will say, but 
 I am here to tell you one tiling, and you must listen to me. 
 Legally, maybe, your cousin Damaris had no claim on this 
 estate, but you know that slie was brought up from infancy as 
 her grandfatlier's heiress, that she was always encouraged to 
 believe the island would be her own, and that only because of 
 her refusal to marry you was she omitted from her grand- 
 father's will, to your bcneht — perhaps from an old man's 
 perverse tyranny and rage, perhaps a little also from your 
 suggestion and your intrigues. Be that as it will, you are 
 morally bound, unless you are a cur indeed, to share your in- 
 heritance with one who has every moral right, and right of 
 usage, to the whole of it. The dower you boast of having sent 
 was returned to you. Your cousin is poor, but not so poor as 
 to take as your alms \\\vdX is her right. She is with those who 
 can protect her, and is out of the danger to wliich you allowed 
 her to drift witliout stretching out a hand to save her. If you 
 consent to divide in c(p,iity your inheritance with her, I will 
 tell you Avho I am, and give you all proofs and explanations 
 that you may reasonably require. If you refuse I shall bid you 
 good-morning, and rest content with the satisfaction, not a rare 
 one in this world, of having seen an unjust and dishonest man.' 
 
 Louis Roze stared at him, perplexed by his tone, purple 
 with rage and astonishment, made a coward not by conscience 
 but by fear of losing a lucrative order, and so bewildered at the 
 sudden attack that, southerner though he was, he had no good 
 lie ready. All he felt for the moment sensible of was that not 
 a bronze bit of the money, not a rood of the soil, not a rotten 
 bough off one of the trees, should go aAvay from himself to that 
 ■ girl, who had so grossly outraged him in refusing his hand. 
 In a boorish, dumb-animal fashion he had been in love with 
 the handsome child, v/ho had always laughed at him and 
 flouted him, and had never even let him kiss her cheeks in 
 cousinly manner. As she had made her bed so she might lie in 
 it. Not a sou should she get out of him, that he swore ; the 
 will was a good will, attested and duly proved ; no one could 
 gainsay it, and the young woman falsely called Berarde waa 
 without any possible claim whatever ; there had been no legal 
 adoi)tion of her. So lie declared, with many an oath to keep 
 liis courage up before tliis stranger, whose manner daunted him; 
 and his wife overhearing tliat it was a question of the inheri- 
 tance which waa under discussion, thrust herself into the 
 balcony and vociferated with shrill iteration and the fury of a
 
 OTHMAR. 191 
 
 woman meiiaccJ in her dearest possessions, that whilst she 
 lived not a centime should ever go away from her lawful lord. 
 
 Othmar turned away before their clamour was half done. 
 
 ' That is enough,' he said to them, 'keep all you have and 
 may it prosper with you. Your cousin has no need of it, but I 
 thought it right to give you a chance to do your duty.' 
 
 Louis Roze eyed him with perplexity, and grew silent. 
 
 Othmar asked him nothing more and took his leave ; the 
 bride and her sisters watching his departure through the in- 
 tricacy of the orange-boughs, giggling and criticising him in 
 audible phrase, tlieir black ej-es and their gold hau'-pins flash- 
 ing in the sunshine amongst the glossy leaves. 
 
 ' That brute will do nothing for her,' he thought, as he 
 descended to his boat. ' And even if he were inclined ever to 
 do so, his wife would never let him follow his inclination. 
 There is nothing on earth so avaricious as peasants who have 
 grown rich.' 
 
 He took his way back to the mainland, and left behind him 
 much imcasine-ss, wonder, and sijcculation amongst the inhabit 
 ants of Bonaventure. 
 
 The will was a good will, and his position was as sound as 
 sound law could make it, yet Louis Roze was not quiet in his 
 mind. He was not a bad man, though greedy, and he felt that 
 this stranger was right ; that something of all he had gained by 
 this inheritance ouglit to go to the child who for so many years 
 had been allowed to look upon herself as the future owner of 
 J5onaventure. He was pursued by his recollections of her 
 leaping like a young kid up tlie rocks, steering through the sea 
 foam and the sunshine, gathering the oranges or the olives, 
 eai'rying the linen down to the beach to dry, running gaily with, 
 the white dogs before her, swimming like a fish with her beautiful 
 arms flung out on the water, and her eyes smiling up at the 
 sky ; la mouctte as the people had called her, because she was so 
 at home in the waves and the Vv-inds. 
 
 Truly she ought to have had something ; she was of the old 
 man's blood, whether or no the law recognised her or not ; and 
 where was she and what would become of her 1 His thoughts 
 were painful and perplexed as he smoked his pipe under the 
 orange trees. 
 
 But he was not ready to part with any portion of what had 
 been bequeathed to him. He was well off certainly, still no 
 one has ever enough ; and his wife was with child, and might 
 in time give him a score of children. It was better to keep 
 Avhat he had got, and, after all, 1 'amaris had insulted him after 
 being aflianced to him from the time she was twelve, and his 
 heart hardened utterly against her at that memory. If she had 
 not been an obstinate, insolent, wajTvard fool she woidd have 
 been here now, instead of the young woman from St. Tropez,
 
 192 OTHMAR. 
 
 who had a shrew's tongue, which Louis Roze heard ofteiierthan 
 he cared to hear it. 
 
 So ho thrust the matter from his mind and counted the 
 oranges on the tree nearest him with complacent sense of 
 ownership. This stranc;er had said that Damaris was witli 
 friends, let them look after her ; his conscience was clear. 
 
 Wlien in the course of tlie day he learned from some deep- 
 sea fishers trawling near the island who his visitor had been — • 
 for the tishermen had recognised Othmar as he had passed in 
 his boat — Louis Roze felt yet less sure that he had done wisely. 
 To have pleased such a rich man might have been worth more 
 than an acre of land, than a handful of gold. He hated aristo- 
 crats with all the savage hatred of a socialist of the south, but 
 he respected rich men with all the admiring esteem which those 
 who love money feel for those who possess it in unusual abun- 
 dance. The good-will of this archimilUonnaire might have been 
 more valuable to him than a little piece of the land, had he 
 offered it frankly as his cousin's share. 
 
 When, in a week's time, some persons came to him to seek 
 to buy the island, he was certain that they came from his late 
 visitor, although they came only in the name and by the com- 
 mission of a well-known lawyer of Aix. 
 
 He was himself dazzled by the great sums they were willing 
 to propose, was half-disposed to treat with them ; but his bride 
 was shrewder, or thought herself so, than he. 
 
 ' Would you barter your coming child's property 1 ' she 
 hissed in his ear. ' If rich men seek after the place, be sure it 
 is because it has some value we are not aware of ; it has some 
 buried treasure that they know of, or some silver in the rocks, 
 or some other ore or another. If you sell it j'ou will never 
 forgive yourself. Keep it, and send them about their business, 
 and begin to bore in the ground and see what you can find.' 
 
 The suggestion heated the fancy and the cupidity of her 
 husband. Of course, he reilected, no one offered three or f(jur 
 times the apparent value of a place unless they knew that it 
 would become worth what they were anxious to pay for it ; and 
 he sternly refused to hearken to any terms of sale for the rock 
 of Bonaventuro. 
 
 ' What is mine is mine, and all the kings of the earth cannot 
 buy it of mo,' he said, with a petty mind's delight in power and 
 in the occasion of baffling and thwarting his superiors. 
 
 ' I believe he is in love witli the girl,' he added to his wife, 
 ' and wants to get the island for her. We might make a rare 
 bargain if it were so ; but those men of Aix are too cautious to 
 let out who is behind them.' 
 
 'Roze,' the wife said, 'you are a simi)leton. There is no 
 love in the business. They know of some value in the island thut 
 ■vyo do not j that is why they want to buy. iJecause you are for
 
 OTHMAR. 193 
 
 ever hanlcei-Ing yourself after that great-eyed, long-limbed child, 
 you tbink every other man is just a fool the same.' 
 
 And Louis Roze, whose temper Avas cowed by the fiercer 
 sharper temper of his bride, gave in to her argument, and 
 remained so stubborn that the agents from Aix could come to 
 no terms with him. 
 
 Inspired by the idea of buried treasures or possible ore in 
 the rocks, he began to neglect his own affairs at St. Troisez and 
 elsewhere, and dig and delve himself in the soil, and hack at 
 the stone face of the cliffs with a pickaxe. The chimera of a 
 fantastic hope entered into him and gave him no peace ; he was 
 ready to ruin all the fair fruits of the surface, and all the arti- 
 ficial soil brought there at such labour in the previous century, 
 for the sake of this imaginary wealth, hidden in the bowels of 
 the isle. 
 
 Meantime the men of Aix informed Othmar that it was not 
 possible to induce the proprietor to part with Bonaventure, and 
 ventured to hint that the property was not worth one-half or 
 one-quarter of what he had been willing to spend on its 
 jDurchase. 
 
 ' That may be,' he said; 'but it is a caprice of mine. If 
 the island ever comes into the market, obtain it for me on any 
 terms. The owner may need money some day, or may change 
 his mind.' 
 
 His experience of men was that they always sold things in 
 the long run, if they could do so with advantage, and that they 
 seldom remained in the same mind when it turned to their 
 profit to change it. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 When he returned from the south he paused at Amyot before 
 going on to Paris. He wanted a day or two to reflect on the 
 future of Damaris before he saw her again. It was a problem 
 which did not very easily admit of solution, without oppress- 
 ing her with a sense of debt and servitude. 
 
 The certainty that her cousin would do nothing to help her 
 brought home to himself the gravity of his position towards 
 her. He had taken her from the streets as a kind man will 
 take a stray dog ; he had as much actual right to turn her out 
 to them again as the man would have to turn out the dog, but 
 his compassion and his chivalry forbade him to think of such 
 desertion of her. There was that in the loneliness of her 
 circumstances which touched all the warmest and most pitiful 
 fibres of his nature, whilst the fact that more or less directly 
 the caprice of his wife had been the beginning of all her mia- 
 
 o
 
 ,94 OTHMAR. 
 
 fortunes, made liim feel that he owed a duty and a debt to her 
 whicli coukl only be discharged by the most honest and sedidous 
 endeavour to do well by her and secure her future from ship- 
 wreck. 
 
 But what Avas that future to be ? To seek any counsel from 
 his wife seemed to him useless. He had seen her more than 
 once moved to strong interest and expectation by some nascent 
 talent which she had fostered and sheltered in the sunshine of 
 her favour, in the hothonse of her world ; and he had also seen 
 her intolerant impatience and her profound oblivion when her 
 anticipations had been unrealised, and that which she had 
 honoured had proved incapable of rising to the heights of great 
 achievement. He knew the changes of her temperament too 
 well to be willing to sul)ject to their fluctuations a proud and 
 sensitive child. Even if she deigned to notice her again, 
 Damaris could never be more to her than a mere plaything, and 
 she had a terrible habit of tiring of her toys in ten minutes. 
 She had had a fanciful idea that the girl had talents of a high 
 order, and he knew that if her fancy proved at fault she would 
 become intolerant of tlie person Avho had disappointed her 
 expectations. JMediocrity had always seemed to her the worst 
 of all offences. The flowers which might unclose at sunrise 
 might never reach, or never bear if they did reach, the glare of 
 noon. The world is pitiless, that he knew, and to its wedding 
 feast of fame many crov/d, but few are chosen. And Nadege, 
 he knew too, would be as intolerant as the world if where she 
 had deigned to believe that genius existed, she should only find 
 a mere facile and fragile talent, without power to ascend where 
 she bade it soar, or force to justify her protection of it. 
 
 He had not, either, forgotteri her suggestion before Loswa's 
 sketch, that some day he would fall in love with the subject of 
 it. The jest had annoyed him and offended him. 
 
 Some time, no doubt, she would know everything : circum- 
 fitances would bring it before her if the world and Damaris 
 ever became acquainted ; and if not, if obscurity became the 
 child's lot, and failure the issue of her dreams, then it would be 
 better that Nadine, who had no pity for the one or sympathy 
 with the other, should hear nought of her. He did not care to 
 dwell himself on the possibilities of the future of one who seemed 
 to him so ill fitted for the prosaic brutalities of a struggle for 
 fame : he had temporised with her destiny, and vaguely trusted 
 to some sequence of fair chances to drift the barque of her life 
 into some safe haven. Of the pure and cliivalrous tenderness 
 for her which he felt, he would liave been ashamed to speak to 
 any living soul : for who Avould have believed him ? 
 
 ' How difficult it is to do a little good !' he thought, as ho 
 drove through the deep glades of his own woods, through the 
 cool, dewy, windless air of a summer evening towards the great
 
 OTHMAR. ■ 195 
 
 castle which had once known tlie Valois kings. * Now, if I 
 wished to do the most brutal, selfish, hellish tiling on earth, 
 how easy it would be ! I should hud the whole world conspiring 
 to help me, and sliould buy souls as easily as if they were 
 oysters ! ' 
 
 Since his son had been born there, an afFection for Amyot 
 had come to him. It was his residence of j'jreference ; if it liad 
 been possible he would have liked never to leave its vast woods, 
 its sunny shining courts, its majestic and historic solitudes. 
 Tlie feeling that he was a new comer there had been soothed 
 away as years had passed ; he had ceased to be haunted by the 
 memories of his fathers' evil deeds ; he had begun to look for- 
 ward to a race springing from himself wdiich should ennoble and 
 justify the riches of the Othmars. It had become to him less 
 an ill-acquired and eternal monvnnent of his ancestors' iniquities 
 than tlie cherished birthplace of children who would transmit 
 to the far future his own conscience and his own honour. But 
 as he came to it now in its stillness and loneliness, the earlier 
 feeling stole back on him, as a bitter taste will survive and 
 return when a sweet one lias passed away. 
 
 It towered before him in the warm etliereal rose of the sun- 
 rise on the morning of his arrival, one of the greatest of the 
 historical palaces of a chivah'ous and immemorial land ; and as 
 tlie first beams of the eastern sun caught the glittering vanes of 
 tlie towers, the gilded salamanders of the first Francis, he once 
 more recalled with sudden sharpness and disgust the memory 
 that the Othmars had entered these mighty stone portals only 
 through the usurer's right-of-way ; had climbed these loity 
 sculptured towers only by the money-lender's ladder of gold. 
 
 The world of men had forgotten it, or, if they ever remem- 
 bered it, did so only with respect and envy as they always 
 jealously and admiringly chronicle what they call self-made 
 success. But to him it was humiliating and hateful. Some- 
 times it seemed to him that, had he done what his conscience 
 and his manhood required, he vv'ould have refused utterly and 
 always to use this wealth of theirs in any luxury, would have 
 stripped it ofi" him like a plague-stricken garment, he would have 
 gone to any personal toil, with hands empty but clean — dreams, 
 faiiatic'il and foolish dreams, all men would have said, yet 
 dreams wliich, followed out, would have had in them a certain 
 nobility, a certain reality, a certain fulfilment of the ideals of 
 his youth. 
 
 As he paced its terraces in the balmy stillness, the gardens 
 outstretched beneath him in all their beauty, which bloomed and 
 faded unseen by any eyes save those of the hirelings who tended 
 them, the remembrance of the dead girl who once had dwelt 
 there beside him in a summer such as this came back upon him 
 as it did often now since he had found and read those pathetid 
 
 o2
 
 196 OTHMAR. 
 
 records of her short life. A repentant consciousness whisperecl 
 that to her those dreams would not have seemed absurd : with 
 her they would not have been impos.sible. Yseulte would have 
 obeyed him had he chosen to change Amyot to a La Garaye. 
 
 He would have seemed to her no more unwise or mad had 
 he stripped her of all wealth and luxury than Claude of La 
 Garaye seemed to the woman whose bones lie beside his beneath 
 tlie weeds and grasses of the graveyard of Taden. Had he said 
 but one word to her of such a dedication of their lives, all her 
 unworldly simplicity and courage, all her childlike optimism, 
 and faith, all her heroism, fervour and superstition, would have 
 made her whole soul kindle at his invitation as spirit leaps to 
 flame ui the first touch of fire. With her it would have been 
 J)! ssible ; a life wholly unlike the life of the world, led in open 
 contradiction of all its opinions, demands and estimates ; spent 
 in entire imaginative atonement for the greeds and the crimes 
 of dead men. 
 
 ' No, it would not have been possible,' he thought, as these 
 memories floated tlirough his brain. 'No; for the life of La 
 (jiaraye two things are essential, Love and Faith. I had none 
 of tlie first for her ; I have none of the second either for man 
 or God.' 
 
 La Garaye was the outcome of blind unquestioning belief in 
 humanity and heaven, such belief as can only come over narrow 
 horizons and to uncultured minds. ' Have Augustine's faith,' 
 s:iys a modern teacher to a faithless world. But the teacher for- 
 gets that the world can no more return to its abandoned faiths 
 tlian a man can return to the toys and the joys of his infancy. 
 
 There is a profound melancholy in the soUtary musings of 
 every man or woman whose youth has liarboured all the high 
 ideals of a lofty and pensive enthusiasm, and whose maturity is 
 lield down by all tlie innumerable Labits and demands, lusages and 
 necessities of life in the great world. Society is imperious and 
 irresistible. Out of its beaten track none of its subjects can 
 wander far or long. Its atmosphere is pregnant at once with 
 sloth and excitement, and its bonds are liliputian but indestruc- 
 tible. Society has neither imagination nor ideality, and wlieii 
 either of these comes into it, it destroys it unmercifully. 
 There is a potent attraction in it even for tliose wiio believe 
 themselves the least suscci)tible of such seduction, and the net- 
 work of its usages and habits becomes a prison which even the 
 most unwilling captives learn to prefer to liberty. 
 
 It might have been possible once, possible to have given 
 back all those ill-gotten millions to the hungry multitudes of 
 humanity ; possible to have strijiped himself (jf all pomj) and 
 pcjssession and been nothing on earth save such as his own brain 
 might have had power to make liim. It might have been possible 
 pnce, but it wa^ now (lud foi' tver impossible!
 
 OTHMAR. 197 
 
 Such thoughts drifted through liis mind as he paced the 
 beautiful rose- colonnades and magnolia-groves of these gardens 
 wliich had in them the sadness inseparable from all i)laces 
 which have a history and have once been peopled by a historic 
 race. 
 
 Neither power nor place had any fascination for him, and the 
 meannesses of mankind wearied him and left his heart barren. 
 Wlien the world grudges the rich man his ' unearned increment,' 
 it forgets how much base coin it gives him in revenge for his 
 possessions ; it is for ever seeking to cheat or, at best, to use 
 him ; the j^arasite and the sycophant are always licking the dust 
 from his patli, that, unseen, they may steal the gold from his 
 pocket ; the meanest side of all humanity is exposed to him ; 
 even friendship becomes scarcely distinguishable from flattery, 
 and the greed, the envy, and the low foibles of his fellows, 
 tiiough the base toys with which the cynic plays, leave his soul 
 sick when it is not covered with the cynic's buckler. 
 
 Othmar was no cynic, and his knowledge of his fellows had 
 saddened and oppressed him. This knowledge had not made 
 him serve them less faithfully, but it had taught him that all 
 such service was utterly vain, either to secure gratitude or to 
 ennoble society. The world rolls on, soaked in dulncss, in 
 bestiality, in cruelty, in a hideous monotony of vulgar inven- 
 t ons and crafty crimes and imbecile conventionalities ; it has 
 America instead of Athens, a machine instead of an art, a 
 Kiapotkine instead of a Socrates — and it prates of progress ! 
 
 Governed by money as men are, things were possible to 
 Othmar which would liave been impossible, or most ditticult at 
 least, to many. His position made a vast number and variety 
 of persons of all clashes known to him ; his large liberalities had 
 endeared him to many people of all kinds, who would have done 
 J. ny thing he desired in return for his benefits ; he had always 
 dealt with his fellows with great kindliness and indulgence, but 
 with perspicuity and intelligence ; he was well served by those 
 who laboured fur him, and was seldom betrayed. Ingratitude 
 and treachery he met with sometimes, but less often than his 
 own slight estimate of human nature led him to expect, and 
 Avhen he needed assistance or service he could always find on 
 the instant instruments adajjted to his end. If he had had the 
 instincts of a bad nature he could have contributed endlessly to 
 the demoralisation of his fellow-men ; with the temperament he 
 possessed he never asked any return for his benefits orexpecttd 
 any thankfulness for them. Nevertheless the world was set 
 thick with his debtors, if he believed that he numbered few 
 friends, and whenever he wanted anything done it was as easy 
 for him to discover doers of it as it was for the Borgia to find 
 the hand that would fill the cup, the fingers that would use th^ 
 dagger,
 
 198 OTHMAR. 
 
 One lialf-houi-'s thouglit, as lie •vvandcrod througli the lonely 
 gardens of liis chateau, sufficed him to dispose of the problem 
 of Damaris's fate. She must be made to believe, he decided, 
 that her grandfather had left her enough to keep her from 
 want, and she must be placed somewhere in safety. As for her 
 genius, if genius she had, it Avould find lis -vvay to cultui-e as 
 surely as a plant to the light. But meantime she must live : 
 and live without imagining that she lived on charity. The only 
 way to make it possible for her to do so would be to induce 
 her to think that she had not been wholly forgotten by Jean 
 Berarde. So he reasoned, and acted on liis conclusions without 
 weighing their possible consequences to himself or her. 
 
 He was a man much more truthful than life in the world 
 makes men usually. A falsehood was contemptible and cowardly 
 in his sight. One of his most continual contentions with Fried- 
 rich Othmar had always been his refusal to admit that lyii'g 
 was needful in politics and finance ; and in private life his wife 
 laughed at him frequently for his distaste to those mere soc'al 
 unti'utlis which have become the small change of society's cur- 
 rency. He disliked all svibtcrfuge, all sophism, all distortion of 
 fact, and even the harmless falsehood of complioient. 
 
 But this single untruth to be told to Damaris seemed so neces- 
 siry, so harmless, that it carried with it no odour of dishonesty to 
 him. In no other way could she be kept from want and danger. 
 Without some such simple ruse she could never be saved from 
 herself, and from all that impetuosity and ignorance which 
 would destroy her as surely as a like enthusiasm destroyed the 
 virgin of Domremy. 
 
 Rich people, who have many connections and dependents, 
 can arrange circumstances to their liking in many small ways, 
 with a facility which is sometimes in pathetic contrast with 
 their powerlessness to command pei'sonal happiness and health, 
 human gratitude or human contentment. To Othmar it was 
 easy to arrange circumstances for those in whom he Avas in- 
 terested, though it was out of his power to make his own life 
 the thing he would have liked it to be. His wide command of 
 money, and his great knowledge of men and women, enabled 
 him sometimes to play the part of deus ex marhind success- 
 fully. He tried to play it for Damaris : tried, with an honest 
 wish to .serve her, and a boyijh disregard of consequence^, 
 which would have made his wife, had she known of them, call 
 him a bergcr dc Flonan in pitiless ridicule. 
 
 Amongst the many persons Avho owed him more than a 
 common debt, there was an old woman whose only remaining 
 grandson, a young student at the time, had been compromised 
 3n the days of the Commune, and would have been nmnbered 
 amongst those who were to be shot without mercy, had not 
 OtliMiai-, who was at Versailles at the time, interceded for and-
 
 OTHMAR. 199 
 
 saved him, being touched by the youth's fine countenance and 
 l)is entreaty to be allowed to see his giundniotlier ere he died. 
 On inquiry and further knowledge of the lad he had been more 
 and more interested in him, perceiving that mistaken creeds 
 and distorted ideals had brought him amongst this sorry com- 
 pany of pillagers and pctroleuses. He had influence enough 
 Avith M. Thiers to get a free pardon for the youth, on condi- 
 tion of his leaving France at once. He sent him at his own 
 expense out of the country, gave him a clerkship in his house at 
 Vienna, and had the satisfaction of seeing him become in a 
 few years a peaceable and happy citizen, a diligent and devoted 
 servant. 
 
 The old grandmother, by name Reine Chabot, owned and 
 farmed a few acres of good land near Les Hameaux, in the rich 
 vale of Chevreuse. To Othmar, who had saved her boy in body 
 and soul, she would have given body and soul herself. She 
 was a hale and strong woman, of simple habits and of noble 
 mind. She was a recluse, but not a morbid one, and her ways 
 and manner of life were similar to those which Damaris had 
 been used to on the island of Bonaventure. To her he resolved 
 to confide the girl's charge during her convalescence, or for so 
 long as she might need a home. He went himself down to the 
 farm, and, almost before he had spoken, his request was granted 
 and received as an honour. 
 
 The dark, stern eyes of the aged woman were soft with 
 moisture as she joined her brown hands on his, and said with 
 fervour : 
 
 ' All that I liave is yours to command. Did you not do for 
 nie and mine that which was beyond all praise or price I ' 
 
 ' I have found two people who accept my motives as honest 
 ones,' thought Otlmiar. ' I shall surely find no more. To expect 
 belief in any action that has no personal object at the bottom 
 of it is a folly that nobody but a boy should commit. The 
 cliild believes in me because she is at the age of faith and of 
 innocence ; and the woman believes me because she adores me 
 and does not look any further ; but nobody else will be so quick 
 in faith.' 
 
 The farmhouse, called the Croix Blanche, was a stout 
 seventeenth-century building, which had escaped injury during 
 the great war by some miracle, and was as lonely in its situa- 
 tion as though it had been five hundred instead of fifteen miles 
 from Paris. In such a retreat he tiiought this checked and 
 bruised sea-bird might find as safe a nest for a season of rest as 
 the lark found there in the long grass of its meadows. Rural 
 quietude, pure air, good care, and the balm which lies for 
 poetic temperaments in the mere sense that the country silences 
 are around them, would do all that was needed, he fancied, to 
 restore the natural buoyancy and strength of her constitution,
 
 200 OTHMAR. 
 
 and thither he directed the nuns to take her one afternoon when 
 the shadows grew long over the grass pastures and quiet woods 
 of that smiling and pastoral country which stretches around the 
 ruins of what was once Port-Royal des Champs. 
 
 She was in that state of weakness blended with the delicious 
 sense of returning health which makes life seem like a dream, 
 and all its scenes pass like dream-pictures. She was filled with 
 a vague sense of perfect faith and peace, and all that he did for 
 her she accepted unquestioningly as undoubted good. 
 
 Wlien she saw the low grey-stone farmhouse covered with 
 its climbing roses, its wooden outhouses buried under elder and 
 poplar ti-ees, its grass lands lying warm in the glow of the after- 
 noon sun, she stretched out her thin hands to it all as to a friend, 
 and tears of pleasure swam in her eyes. 
 
 ' It is the country,' she said under her breath with delight. 
 
 All the sweet pungent smell of the turned earth where a 
 labourer dug in it, all the fresh glad scent of growing leaves 
 and ripening fruits and grasses browning in the sun, all the 
 familiar sounds, a watch-dog's bark, a blaclcbird's song, the hum 
 of bees in the rose bloom, the distant call of a corncrake in the 
 meadows — they were all dear and welcome like the voices of 
 friends long unheard. It was the country: all the strength and 
 the warmth and the force of her youtli seemed to rush back 
 into her veins with the sight and the sounds of it. 
 
 For the first time since she had left the island she laughed. 
 
 ' That is well,' thought the old woman, her hostess, regarding 
 her. ' Those who love the country have clean souls.' 
 
 She had not asked or wished to ask any questions concerning 
 her guest. 
 
 In her eyes Othmar could do no wrong, and to her gratitude 
 his will was law. But she had kept her own soul clean all her 
 days, dwelling here always in tlicse same green peaceful places ; 
 and as she looked on the face of Damaris she was glad, for she 
 saw there three things Avhicli are as beautiful as flowers^inno- 
 ccnce, and youth, and ignorance of all fear and guile. 
 
 Damaris slept very soundly that night in a little white room 
 tliat smelt of lavender and ptresscd rose-leaves, and when she 
 aAvoke in the morning heard the pleasant sound of mowing 
 scythes, of rippling water, of a tlirush's singing in a blossoming 
 elder bough ; and all the young life in her seemed to arise and 
 grow anew, and become once more as glad to greet the sun as 
 any bird which wakes at dawn as the first white light gleams 
 throngli its house of leaves. 
 
 Many quiet and almost happy smnmer days followed for her, 
 in which she recovered all her normal strength. The ways and 
 the work of the farm were familiar and welcome to her, and 
 she scarcely waited to be weU before taking to hersglf a shar© 
 yf its Itvbours.
 
 OTHMAR. 201 
 
 The widow Chabot asked her no questions, but she, having 
 no secrets, soon related the few incidents of her short existence, 
 and heard in return the narrative of Othiuar's actions during 
 the Commune. Taciturn by temperament, and grave and re- 
 served by habit as the old woman was, she grew eloquent when- 
 ever she spoke of the saviour of the last of her race, and 
 Damaris, when the day's work was done, and they sat together 
 in the rose-coloured porch while the spinning-wheels flew roujid, 
 never wearied of hearing that tale, and said in her own heart as 
 she listened, ' How good he is ! — hoAV good ! ' 
 
 These summer weeks in Chevreuse were full of rest and 
 solace to her. It was but a pause, a halt before the heat and 
 stress of life, she knew ; an ' itape ' such as she had seen the 
 dust-covered conscripts on the march enjoy, resting by the 
 wayside under the trees, where some little warer-spring bubbled 
 up amongst the cistus bushes and the euphorbia of a Riviera 
 road. But she was at peace in it, and, childlike, hardly thought 
 of the morrow. 
 
 Sometimes she looked far away, when the sun rose, to the 
 east where Paris was, and wondered if ever there the world 
 would hear of her, know her, care for her. But it was all vague. 
 Her future was bathed in golden light, Uke the green landscape 
 when the sun came out from the mists of dawn ; but it had no 
 distinctness to her, no definite shape or end. It was mere 
 radiant nebul;^, like the rosy and amber-tinted clouds which 
 the peasants looking eastward said was Paris, though no roof, 
 or dome, or spire was visible when the morning broke. 
 
 Othmar came to see her rarely, and his visits were brief ; 
 but as she had no vanity and had much gratitude, she was wholly 
 content Avith such slight remembrance. He sent her many books 
 and other things which amused her, and her mind was eager 
 for all kinds of knowledge. She had great natural intelligence 
 and quickness of perception, and she read the fine prose and the 
 stately alexandrines of the old French authors with avidity and 
 delight. Something of the intellectual life of Port Pvoyal 
 seemed to her fancy still to linger in the air, and make classic 
 all the rustic paths of this quiet valley. 
 
 When she walked over the daisied grass that grew about the 
 ruined dovecot, Pascal seemed to pace beside her, and as she 
 leaned over the little brook which finds its way amongst the 
 cresses and the mouse-ear, she fancied she saw the face of her 
 great master Racine reflected in its shallow waters. 
 
 Her hostess, though a woman of no great culture, yet was 
 learned enougli in the literature of earlier days, and in tlie asso- 
 ciations of her birthplace, to know every legend and name that 
 are attached to tlie stones and the meadows of Les Hameaux. 
 She Avas no uncongenial couqjanion to an imaginative girl, for 
 though tficiturn, slic covild have ^ certain rude eloquence when
 
 202 OTHMAR. 
 
 strongly moved, and to her reverent and unworldly mind * le3 
 Messieurs de Port-Royal' were ever present memories, both 
 saintly and heroic. 
 
 CHAPTER XXYII. 
 
 He had apportioned the sum needed at a lower figure than his 
 own wislies would have dictated, that it might seem to her more 
 natural as the legacy of Jean Berarde ; it was enough to keep 
 her in such simple ways of life as she had been used to, no more. 
 He told her of it, as of a legacy, the first day that he saw her 
 at Les Hameaux : told it in few words, for all equivocation was 
 painful to him. She never for a moment doubted the truth of 
 the story, and he was touched to see that lier first emotion was 
 not relief at the material safety insured to her, but joy that the 
 old man dying had forgiven her. 
 
 ' If I had only known,' she said through her tears, ' I would 
 Lave gone back to him ! I Avould have gone back just to have 
 heard him say one kind word for the last ! ' 
 
 The thought that her grandsire had pardoned and remem- 
 bered her was a philtre of health and strength to her. It 
 brought back all the warmth to her cheeks, all the depth of 
 colour to her eyes ; she wept passionately, but from a sweet not 
 harsh sorrow, from gratitude to his memory, from thankfulness 
 that his last thought of her had been one of kindness. 
 
 Othmar watched and heard her with an embarrassment which 
 she was too absorbed in her own emotions to notice. 
 
 ' All the money I shall give her would not suflice to buy one 
 of Nadine's rows of peai-ls,' he thought. ' Yet what rapture it 
 aflbrds her ! A lie ! of course it is a lie ; and all my Jesuit 
 tutors could never make me credit that a lie could be a good 
 thing, however good its motive. But this lie is innocent if ever 
 tliere were one innocent, and even if it were a crime the ci'ime 
 would be worth the doing, to set this poor lost sea-bird safe from 
 storm upon a ledge of rock. She would be beaten to death by 
 the waves without some shelter. 
 
 Yet his conscience was not wholly easy as he responded to 
 her warm words of gratitude to himself for having discovered 
 this bequest for her, and anSAvercd her many questions as to the 
 island that she loved, the children of Raphael, the dogs, the 
 trees, tlie boat ; all tilings on Bonaventure were living things to 
 her. However long her life might last, always the clearest and 
 the dearest of her memories would be those sminy childish years 
 in the little isle of fruit and flowers, where for sixteen years tliu 
 Bun had shone and the sea wind blown on her, and the fish and 
 the birds and the beasts been her schoolfellows.
 
 OTHMAR. 203 
 
 She had something of meridional heedlessness, and mnch of 
 ncridional imagination, which made the fiction of her grand- 
 sire's legacy more easily believed by her than it would have 
 t)ccn by more prosaic and cautious tempers. To her it seemed 
 so natural that he should have relented towards her and provided 
 for her. All her memories were of wants provided for by him ; 
 he had been her providence, if a harsh one, for so long that it 
 seemed a natural part of liis character and of her destiny that 
 he sliould C(jntinue to be her providence even in his grave. 
 
 ' If 1 could only be sure that he is happy in heaven,' she 
 said to Othmar, with a certain appeal and doubt in her accent. 
 Even to her, though she had respected him, it was difficvdt to 
 think of Jean Berarde of Bonavcnture in any celestial life. 
 'Do you not think,' she added wistfully, 'that God would 
 reniember that he was a very good man in many ways, and 
 always honest and upright in all his dealings with rich and 
 poor ? He loved money, but he was not mean — not to me, 
 never to me — and if laborare est orarc, as the Sisters used to 
 Bay, surely he must be in peace? ' 
 
 Othmar heard the tormenting fear which was expressed in 
 her tone, and refrained from adding one grain of doubt to it. 
 
 'Be sure he is at peace, my dear,' he answered ; Avhile he 
 thought, ' more peace than such a brute deserves — the peace of 
 utter extinction ; the peace of dissolution and absorption into 
 tlie earth which holds him, into the grass which covers him ; 
 peace which lie shares with kings and poets and heroes ! ' 
 
 ' He believed nothing, you know,' said Damai'is wistfully, 
 * nothing of any creed, I mean. But then, if he could not, was 
 it any more his fault than it is a deaf man's fault that he can- 
 not hear] I think not. Do you remember that poem of Victor 
 Hugo's ? I forget its name, but the one in which a great wicked 
 king of the east, all black with crime, is saved from hell because 
 he has a moment of pity for a pig that is sick and tormented 
 with Hies and lies helpless in the sun ? The king drew the yiig 
 aside out of the sun and drove the flies away. It is beautifully 
 told in the poem ; I tell it ill. But what I mean is, that I 
 tliink if they are angered in heaven with my grandfather 
 because he led a hard, selfish, crooked, cramped life, they will 
 yet let him into paradise because he was so good to me.' 
 
 Othmar assented, with a sense of infinite compassion for her. 
 All her dream was as baseless as the golden city which an even- 
 ing sun builds out of clouds for a moment in the western sky. 
 But he let it be. Life Avould soon enough wake her from such 
 dreams with the rough hand of a stepmother, wdio grudges 
 motherless children sleep. 
 
 ' Let us speak of present tilings,' he said, to distract her 
 thoughts. ' This is very little money, though you think so 
 much of it, which is left to stand between you and all kinds of
 
 204 OTH.ua R. 
 
 Avant. Will you let me place it out for you wliere it will bring 
 you most ? You may have heard, my dear, that I am one of 
 those hapless persons who are doomed by circumstance to have 
 much to do with gold. I hate it, but that is no matter. It is 
 my fate. Will you trust me to try and multiply your little 
 fortune 1 I will bo very careful of it, but something more it 
 shall make for you in my hands than if it were lying in a kitchen 
 chimney or under an orchard wall, which you are too true to 
 your nation not to think the safest kind of investment. I may \ 
 Then be it so. No, do not thank me, there is no need for that. 
 But you are very young and you are not very prudent, I should 
 say, and in these matters you will need advice. Remember 
 alway.s to command mine.' 
 
 She looked at him with grateful but questioning eyes. 
 
 ' "Why should you do so much for me ? ' she said with 
 wonder. 
 
 ' I do very little,' returned Othmar. ' And were it far more, 
 you have a direct claim on me — on us. If my wife had not 
 tempted you away that memorable day, you would have been 
 dwelling contented on your island still, and probably for ever.' 
 
 ' No : not there,' she said slowly, as if she reasoned with 
 herself. ' I do not think I should ever have stayed there very long. 
 I loved it, but I wanted something else. When I used to sit, as 
 so often I sat, all alone on the balcony that hangs over the sea, 
 when it was late at night, and everyone else was asleep, and the 
 nightingales were shouting in the orange-boughs underneath, I 
 used to think that some other world there must be where some 
 one cared for Ondine and Athalie, where some one had cried as 
 I cried for Triboulet and Hernani ; where they did not all talk 
 all day long of the price of oil, and the cost of cargoes, and tho 
 disease in the lemons, and the worm in the olive wood. I knew 
 that all these great and beautiful things could not have been 
 written unless men and women were, somewhere, great and 
 beautiful also ; and very often— oh, often ! long before your 
 Lady spoke to me— I had thought that whenever my grand- 
 father should die I would go and find that world for myself. 
 And now ' 
 
 He waited some moments, but her sentence remained in- 
 comj)lete. 
 
 ' And now ?' he repeated at last. 'Now do you think still 
 that there is siich a world, or do you not see that no one does 
 care for Ondine or Atlialie? that the price of oil and the worm 
 in the olive (or tlieir e(|uivalent.s) are tlie sole carking cares of 
 the great world, just as much as of your peasant-jiroprietors 1 
 Did you not dream of Hernani, and did you not only meet the 
 senjoit de ville 1 ' 
 
 ' I met you ! ' slie said gently, with a tinge of reproach in 
 her voice.
 
 OTIIMAR. 205 
 
 ' My dear child ! ' said Othmar, touched and a little em- 
 barrassed. ' I am far from heroic. Ask the person who knows 
 me best, and she will tell you so. I only rake the woi-ld's .£?old 
 to and fro as if I were a croupier, and I assure you the olives 
 and the lemons are much worthier subjects of thought.' 
 
 She made a little involuntary gesture of her hand, as if she 
 pu-hed away some unworthy suggestion which it was not needful 
 to refute in words. Her face had grown serious and resolute ; 
 she had tlie look of a young Pallas Athene. Innumerable 
 thoughts were crowding on her which she could ill express. 
 
 Ever since a possible fate had been suggested to her in which 
 fame might attend on her, ever since a vague immeasurable 
 ideal had been suggested to her in the music of Paul of Lem- 
 bi'rg, it had become impossible for her ever to remain content 
 with the homely aims and the prosaic thoughts of the people 
 amongst whom she had been born. Heredity and accident had 
 alike combined to divorce her from her natural fate. Of those 
 tlius severed from their original source, thus rebellious against 
 llieir native air, two or three in a generation become great, 
 famous, victorious ; the larger number fall back from the sum- 
 mits which they aspire to reach, and till the restless, dissatisfied, 
 t irnished ranks which are comprised in the all-expressive word 
 dcdasses. But the word seemed unfitted to her ; there were 
 that simplicity, that originality, that force in the child Avliich 
 mark the higher natures of humanity, whether they be found in 
 peasants or in princes ; there were in her also that natural high 
 breeding and absolute self-unconsciousness which render all 
 vulgarity and assumption impossible ; those marks of race 
 which are wholly independent of all circumstance. Jeanne 
 d'Arc greeted her king as her brother, and Christine Nilsson 
 meets sovereigns as her sisters. 
 
 He had seen this child also bear herself Avith inborn grace 
 and natural dignity in the first dazzling scene and unkind em- 
 barrassment of circumstance which she had ever known. It 
 seemed to him that she would go thus through life. 
 
 'I think I could ma]:e the world care,' she said, with a 
 curious mingling of dreaminess and decision, of ardour and of 
 doubt in her tone. ' Even your wife said I might do so — it i^ 
 something outside myself, beyond myself. I do not mean any 
 vanity or folly. It is something one has, as the nightingale has 
 its song, and the lemon flower its odour. If they would hear 
 me— as your Lady heard ? How could I make them hear me 1 ' 
 
 Othmar was silent. 
 
 Then he added almost cruelly, but cruelty seemed to him 
 kindness : 
 
 ' My wife forgot that she had heard you five minutes after- 
 wards : so i)erh.ips would the world. And if so, what then I ' 
 
 * At least I should have tried.'
 
 2o6 OTHMAR. 
 
 The divine obstinacy of genius spoke in tiie -words. Eettcr 
 failure and oblivion than oblivion without efibrt. 
 
 ' If only I could try ] ' she repeated with imploring prayer : 
 to her he seemed the master of the world, as utterly as Agrippa 
 or Augustus seemed so to the Roman girls who saw them pass 
 from palace to temple, 'I know it would be only interpreta- 
 tion ; but I feel their words say so much to me that I surely 
 could interpret them, aloud, so that I could move some to feel 
 them as I do.' 
 
 lie knew she meant the words of those poets which had 
 taken so strong and firm a hold upon her imagination, read as 
 she had read them in the glory of the southern light, between 
 the sea and sky. 
 
 'Perhaps you could,' he answered reluctantly. 'But if 
 you did, what would be your fate % You would die like Aimee 
 Desclee. My wife likened you to her.' 
 
 ' Who was she ? ' 
 
 He told her, with the pathetic force of a profound sym- 
 pathy ; for poor Frou-frou had been well known to him in her 
 brief career, and all the feverish yearning, the tumult of un- 
 satisfied desires, the conflict of genius and malady in that tender 
 and hapless soul had been sacred to him. He passed in silence 
 over the passions of that life, but he dwelt long and earnestly 
 on its storm-tossed youth, and its prematui'e and tragic close. 
 
 Damaris listened ; her whole countenance reflecting the 
 narrative she heard. 
 
 ' I think she was happy,' she said at length. ' You do not, 
 but I do. She broke her heart singing, like the nightingales in 
 the poem. I read once of a sword which wore out its scabbard. 
 Who would not sooner be that than the sword which rusts 
 unused \ ' 
 
 Othmar did not reply. To him the life and the death of 
 Aimee Descle'e were the saddest of his generation ; but he could 
 not tell this child why he thought them so, and even if he could 
 have done it would liave been of no avail. He knew that he 
 argued with that thing which no example appals, no warning 
 affects, no prescience intimidates ; the thing at once so strong 
 and so feeble, at once blind as the bat and far-sighted as tlie 
 eagle — the instinct of genius. 
 
 When he quitted her that day he left her with disquietude 
 and uncertainty. It seemed to him as if he held her fate, like a 
 bird, in his hand, and could either close the cage-door on it iu 
 safety, or toss it upward free to roam through fields of air or to 
 sink under showers of stones as chance might choose. 
 
 He believed that she did not deceive herself when she 
 thought that she could move others by the electric forces within 
 herself. He recognised a certain volition in her which re- 
 Bembled that of genius. Her imagination, which could console
 
 OTHMAR. 207 
 
 h^r for so much, her quick assimilation of high thoughts and 
 poetic fancies, her poAver of feeling impersonal interest, her 
 very ignorance of real life, and imprudence in its circumstances, 
 were all those of genius. Reared in prosaic habits, she had 
 forced her own way to a subjective and idealistic mental life, even 
 amidst the most opposing influences. She had heard the night- 
 ingale in the orange-boughs, though all those around her had been 
 only busied counting the oranges to pack the crates. She had 
 watched the shoal of fishes spread its silver over the waves 
 beneath the moon, though all those around her at such a sight 
 had only thought of the deep sea seine, the casks for market, 
 and the curing brine. Surely this power of withdrawing from 
 all familiar association, and escaping from all compelling forces 
 of habit, could only exist Avhere genius begat it '? 
 
 But then he knew that even with the wedding-garment of 
 genius on, yet to the wedding-feast of fame many are called 
 but few are chosen. And it might be only a breath, a flash, a 
 touch of inspiration, nn hrin de genie, as his wife had said, 
 enough to have impelled her to push open the doors of her 
 narrow destiny, and look thence with longing eyes, but not 
 enough to force her with untired feet and unconquerable 
 courage acrops that desert of efl"ort which parts effort from 
 triumph, poetic faculty from mere dreamy indolence. He who 
 had always from his boyhood honoured and assisted talent, 
 wherever he had found it, with a patience and a liberality very 
 rare in this world, had suflered much disappointment from 
 many ordinary and pretentious lives which he had been led to 
 believe had had the hall-mark of intellectual superiority. He 
 had too often found what deemeditself genius was mere facility ; 
 originality, mere eccentricity ; ambition mere instinct of imita- 
 tion ; the ' coal from the altar' only the momentary blaze of a 
 match. Many and many a time he might have said of the 
 immature Muses vA\o sought him, in the words of Victor Hugo, 
 ' Que de jeunes filles f ai vues mourir ! ' 
 
 Damaris Berarde appeared to him, as to his wife, a beautiful 
 child with an uncommon nature, and with possibly uncommon 
 gifts ; but between the mere promise of the dawn of youth and 
 the full heat of the meridian of genius what a difl;erence there 
 was ! 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 In lien of driving homeward to Paris that day, he turned hi? 
 horses' heads in the direction of Asnieres, where a once famous 
 artist, David Rosselin, lived. 
 
 'I will ask Rosselin,' he thought. ' Rosselin can judge as 
 I have no power to do ; and if ho decide that she has genius she
 
 2o8 OTHMAR. 
 
 had better make a careor so for herself. I have no business to 
 stand between her and any future she may be able to create.' 
 
 He disliked the idea of his "wife's careless predictions being 
 fulfilled. It seemed to him. barbarous to let this white-souled 
 sea-bird soar to the electric-flame life in Paris, fancying its 
 light the sun. But who could tell ? 
 
 It Avas a doubt which troubled and oppressed him as he 
 drove back to Paris through the pastoral country, consecrated 
 by the memory of Port-Royal. He felt that he had no right 
 to make himself the arbiter of her destinies ; he would be no 
 more to her in her future than the dead thinkers whose brains 
 had once been quick with philosophic and poetic creation 
 amidst these quiet green meadows. 
 
 So he opened the little green trellis-work gate which was 
 Bet in the acacia hedge of the cottage at A?<nieres, and fotu.d 
 the once great imper.sonatnr of Alceste, of Tarluffe,'of Sgana- 
 relle sitting beside his beehives and behind his rose-beds, with 
 a white sun umbrella shading his comely and silvered head, and 
 in his hand a miniature Aldine Plautus. His old servant was 
 close by carefully dusting the cobwebs off the branches of an 
 espaliered nectarine. 
 
 It was a small suburban villa which sheltered the last years 
 of the great actor ; a square white house set in a garden, over 
 whose trim hedges of clipped acacia Posselin could see the 
 groups of students and work-girls going down to the landing- 
 stairs of the Seine, and farther yet could see the grey-green 
 shine of the river itself with its pleasure craft going to and fro 
 in the midsummer sunshine. 
 
 David Rosselin in his prime had made many millions of 
 francs, but they had gone as fast as they were gained, and in 
 his old age he was poor : he had only this little square white 
 box, so gay in summer with its roses and wistaria, and within 
 it some few remnants of those magnificent gifts which nations 
 and sovereigns and women and artists had all alike showered 
 upon him in those far-off years of his greatness ; and some 
 souvenir from Othmar of an Aldine classic, or a volume bound 
 by Clovis, which had lain on his table some New Year morning. 
 
 Othmar, who was quickly wearied by men in general, appre- 
 ciated the intelligence and the character of this true pliilosophe 
 sans le savoir, and would have made Rosselin free of all hi^ 
 libraries and welcome at all his houses if the old man would 
 have left for them his white-walled and rose-covered cottage at 
 Asniercs. 
 
 ' No one who is old,' said Rosselin, ' should ever go out, 
 though he may receive, because he knows that those whom he 
 receives care to see him, or they would not come to him ; but 
 how can ho be ever sure that those who invite him do not do so 
 out of charity, out of pity, out of complacency?'
 
 OTHMAR. 209 
 
 And save those of the theatres, of the Conservatoire, and of 
 the public librairie, he crossed no threshold save his own. 
 
 ' If I had only been a grocer,' he used to say with his mellow 
 laugh, ' a good plump grocer, as my poor father wished, who 
 knows ? I might have even been mayor of my native town by 
 this, and had a son a vice-prefet ! ' 
 
 He was a man now nigh on eighty years, erect, vivacious, 
 combating age with all the eternal youthfulness of genius. 
 His black eyes had still a flash of those fires which had once 
 scorched up the souls of women, and his handsome mouth had 
 s'ill the smile of fine irony which had adorned and accentuated 
 his Alceste and his Mascarille. He dwelt alone with a servant 
 nearly as old as himself ; he had a great natural contempt for 
 all domestic ties. 
 
 ' Had I become a grocer I would have married,' he was wont 
 to say. ' If you are in trade, respectability is as necessary to 
 you as dishonesty ; but to the artist the nightcap of marriage is 
 like the biretta which they draw over a man's head in Spain 
 before they garotte him. When once you put it on, advin les 
 
 reves 
 
 f> 
 
 And in his celibate old age, if he had no longer dreams, he 
 had recollections and interests which kept him mentally young. 
 His Paris was his one mistress, of whom he never tired. 
 
 He had left the stage five-and-twenty years and more, in 
 h's own person, but he still took the keenest interest, possessed 
 the highest influence, in all higher dramatic art and life. The 
 silence of David Rosselin on a first night condemned a play as 
 an irrevocable failure, whilst his smile of approval was assurance 
 to an author that he had successfully empoigne his public. He 
 was the most accurate of judges, the most penetrating of critics ; 
 he would occasionally make little epigi-ammatic speeches which 
 remained like little barbed steel darts, but he was indulgent to 
 youth and encouraging to modesty. When Rosselin said that a 
 pupil of the Conservatoire had a future, the future, when it 
 became the present, never belied his judgment. For the rest, 
 he was in a small way a bibliophile, delighted in rare copies 
 and delicate bindings, and was an unerring authority on all 
 centuries of costume and custom. 
 
 ' Incessantly acting all your life, when did you find all the 
 time to acquire so much knowledge 'I ' Paul Jacob had said once 
 to him. 
 
 David Rosselin had replied with his genial laugh : 
 
 ' Ah, mon cher, I have had all the time that I should have 
 spent in quai'relling with my wife if I had had one ! ' 
 
 This love of books had been a bond of sympathy between 
 him and Othmar ever since one night in the green-room of the 
 I'rauf'ais, when they had spoken of fifteenth-century Virgi.s ; 
 and to him the thoughts of Othmar had turned more than once 
 
 p
 
 2IO OTHMAR. 
 
 since the problem of Damaris and her destiny had come before 
 him. There was no one in all Europe who could discern the 
 gold from the pinchbeck in human talent with such precision ; 
 no one who could more unerringly discriminate betw^een the 
 aspirations of genius and its capabilities, between the mere 
 audacities of youth and the staying powers of true strength. 
 
 An absurd reluctance to speak of her, of which he was 
 ashamed, and for which he would have assigned no definite 
 reason even to himself, had made him indisposed to seek lii.5 
 old friend on such a subject ; but it seemed to him, now that 
 her soul was apparently set on the career which his wife's care- 
 less praise had suggested to her, no other way of life was so 
 possible for her, or so likely to afford her interest, occupation 
 and independence. 
 
 He had seen the life of the stage near enough to loathe it. 
 The woman whom he had adored with all a boy's belief and 
 passion, and who had been hired by his father's gold to do him 
 the cruel service of destroying all belief in him, had been an 
 actress, famous for the brief day of splendour which beauty 
 without genius can gain in the cities of the world. He hated 
 to imagine that the time might come when this child, full now 
 of ideals of heroisms, of innocence a.nd of faithfulness, might 
 grow to be such a woman as Sara Vernon had been ! Sara 
 Vernon, who had now turned saint and dwelt in the odour of 
 good works on her estates in Franche-Comte : the estates which 
 had been his father's purchase-money of her. 
 
 But it seemed to him that he had no right to let his personal 
 prejudices, his personal sentiments or sentimentality, stand 
 between Damaris and any possibility of future independence, 
 of future happiness which might open out before her through 
 her natural gifts. He felt nothing for her except a great com- 
 jmssion and a passionless admiration, and he had a sense of 
 indefinite self-blame and of infinite embarrassment for the 
 position towards her into which circumstances had drifted him. 
 It was not possible to retreat from it : he had become her 
 only friend, her sole support ; but the sense that to the world, 
 and perhaps even to his wife, his too impulsive actions would 
 be;ir a very different aspect, haunted liini witli a feeling which 
 was foreboding rather than regret. 
 
 'Ah! my friend!' said Rosselin in some surprise, as he 
 passed through the gate. 'Is it possible you arc in Paris 
 while Sirius reigns over the asphaltoif It is charming and 
 gracious of you to remember a decre]iit old gardener. Come 
 and sit by me in tlie shade here, and Pierre sliall bring you tlie 
 biggest of the nectarines. If Virgil could have tasted a necta- 
 rine ! There may 1)0 doubts about every other form of i>ro- 
 gress, but there can be no manner of doul)t that we have 
 improved fruits since the Georgics, and wines.'
 
 OTHMAR. 211 
 
 Otlimar answered a little at random, and accepted the 
 nectarine. The quick regard of Rosselin read easily that there 
 was something in the air graver than their usual talk of rare 
 Cflitions and coming book-sales which his visitor desired to say 
 to him, and with a sign dismissed the old servant to the strip 
 of kitchen garden on the other side of the house. 
 
 Othmar made his narrative as brief, his own share in it as 
 small, and the facts as prosaic as he could ; but he could not 
 divest them of a tinge of romance which he was ill-pleased to 
 discover to the shrewd compreheiieion of the great artist who 
 listened to him. 
 
 ' Do what I will, tell it all how I may,' he thought angrily, 
 * how ridiculous I shall look to him, playing knight-errant like 
 this ! ' 
 
 And as he related the story of Damaris to Rosselin he 
 seemed in fancy to hear the voice of his wife behind him com- 
 menting in her delicate suggestive tones on his own exaggerated 
 share in it. What she Avould say, and what the world would 
 say, seemed to him to be said for both injihe momentary smile 
 which passed over Rosselin's face. 
 
 'Of course he does not believe me,' he thought. 'Nobody 
 will ever believe me. They will always suppose that I have 
 base reasons which have never even approached me ; they will 
 always accredit me with the coarsest of motives.' 
 
 Rosselin , with his power of divining the thoughts of others, 
 guessed what was thus passing through his mind. 
 
 ' Yes, they will certainly never accredit you with a good 
 motive,' he said, answering the unspoken thoughts of his visitor. 
 ' For that you must be prepared. But if you think that I shall 
 do so, you mistake. You are a man, my dear Count Othmar, 
 who is much more likely to bo fascinated by a disinterested 
 action than by a vulgar amour. I understand you, but I warn 
 you that nobody else will.' 
 
 'I suppose not,' said Othmar. 'That must be as it may. 
 How did you divine so well what I was thinking oiV 
 
 ' Divination of that kind is easy after experiences as long as 
 mine are,' answered Rosselin, gathering one of his carnations 
 and fastening it in his linen coat. ' If we do not acquire that 
 much from life we live to be old to little purpose. You have 
 done a generous thing, and probably the world will punish you 
 for it ; it always does. The position your chivalry has led you 
 into is of course certain to be explained in one way, and one 
 only, by people in general. The world is not delicate, and it 
 never api)reciates delicacy.' 
 
 'Of that I am well aware,' returned Othmar. 'It is on 
 account of the coarseness of all hasty and ordinary judgments 
 that I wish to keep my own name and personality hidden as 
 much as possible in relation to this child. If her own talents 
 
 p2
 
 212 OTHMAR. 
 
 could secure independence for her, it would be very much to be 
 desired that they should do so. Will you do me thfe favour to 
 j udge of them ? ' 
 
 Rosselin hesitated. 
 
 'You can command me in all ways,' he added. 'But I 
 think it only fair to warn you that, even if she have very great 
 talent, as you seem to believe, neither technique nor culture 
 come by nature. Training, long, arduous, severe, and to the 
 young most odious, is the treadmill on which everyone must 
 work for years before being admitted into the kingdom of art. 
 Has she enough to live on during these years of probation l ' 
 
 ' Yes,' answered Othmar ; he did not feel called upon to 
 confess his device for supplying this necessity. ' All I would 
 ask of you is your judgment of her talents. Of course she is 
 only a child ; she has seen and heard nothing ; even the poorest 
 stage she has never seen. She has not had any of those indirect 
 lessons which the very poverty and misery of their surroundings 
 gave Rachel and Desclee. They were always in the road of 
 their art, even though they went to it tlu-ough mire. She knows 
 nothing, absolutely nothing ; I tell you she has not been even 
 inside the booth of strolling players at a fair. Yet she gave to 
 my wife and to me the impression of latent genius. Will you 
 see her and hear her, and then give me your opinion 1 ' 
 
 ' I would do much more for you, my dear friend,' replied 
 Rosselin with a vague sense of reluctance. ' But I have seen so 
 many of these maidens who dream of the stage — little, quiet, 
 good girls, with mended stockings and holes in their umbrellas, 
 thronging to the Conservatoire to pipe out "O sire ! je vaia 
 mourir" or " Infame ! croyez-vous," going away with their 
 mothers like chickens under the hen's wing when a big dog is 
 in the poultry-yard ; falling in love with the student who gives 
 them the repliqiie, keeping chocolate in their pockets to nibble 
 at like little mice between the scenes ; little good girls, some 
 pretty, some ugly, some saucy, some shy, all of them as poor as 
 church rats, all of them with hair-pins tumbling out of their 
 braids— j'en ai mi, tant ! And hardly a spark of genius amongst 
 them ! When they have fine shoulders and big eyes, then their 
 career is certain — in a way ; when they have no figure at all and 
 no complexion, then they go into the provinces and one hears 
 no more of them ; or, perhaps, they leave their illusions alto- 
 gether at the Conservatoire, and take a place behind a counter. 
 It is the prudent ones who do that : " dies commencent oil les 
 mitres Jinissent." Some clever woman has said so before mo. 
 Is it not better to begin so? Wliy not get a little snug shop for 
 Mademoiselle Berarde from the first ? ' 
 Othmar moved impatiently. 
 
 'And the two or three wlio are better than the rest,' he asked ; 
 ' those whose lips the bees of Hymettus have really kissed 1 '
 
 OTHMAR. 213 
 
 ' My clear friend, you know liow it is with these also,' aigliecl 
 Rosselin : ' immense success, immense insouciance, immense 
 enjoyment for the first few years ; lovers like the leaves on the 
 trees in midsummer ; debts as numerous as the leaves ; enor- 
 mous sums thrown away like waste paper ; beauty, health, 
 power, aU spent like a rouleau of gold in a fool's hand at Monte 
 Carlo ; and then the degringolade, the apathy of the public, the 
 indifference of the lovers, the persecution of the creditors whose 
 ardour grows as hotly as that of the others cools, the infinite 
 mortifications, humiliations, chagrins, disappointments ; then 
 the death from anaemia or from consumption, or the still worse 
 end, which is a fifty-year-long obscurity : Sopliie Arnould sweep- 
 ing out her garret with a two-sous broom ! Ah bah ! Marry 
 Mile. Be'rarde to one of your cashiers, and buy her a cottage at 
 Neuilly.' 
 
 ' Do you suppose Descle'e or Rachel would have married a 
 clerk, and lived in a little house in the suburbs ? ' said Othmar 
 with some impatience. 
 
 'Ah, who can say? Neither would have stayed with the 
 clerk certainly,' replied Rosselin, lifting up the drooped stalk of 
 one of his picotees and fastening it to its deserted stick. ' It is 
 all a matter of chance and circumstance. Temperament goes 
 for much, but accident counts for more, and opportunity for 
 most. You say yourself, for instance, that Mile. Berarde might 
 have lived and died on her island but for some careless words 
 of Madame Nadine and an invitation to St. Pharamond. Wliile 
 we are young life is always inviting us somewhere, and we accept 
 the invitations, without thinking whether they will lead us to 
 Bicetre or to a quiet cottage garden in our old age. Allons 
 done! Let us do our best to secure the garden and the sunshine 
 for your little friend from the South. I need not assure you 
 that you shall have my perfect honesty of opinion and my abso- 
 lute discretion concerning her. Will you come into the house 
 a moment 1 I picked up yesterday, at a bookstall, a precious 
 little bouquin ; nothing less than a copy of the " Terentii 
 Comoedias" of 1552 by Roger Payne.' 
 
 Othmar went in and admired the bouquin, and stayed a few 
 moments longer, while the evening grew duskier and the scent 
 of the carnations and stocks and great cabbage-roses came richer 
 and sweeter through the open windows into the small rooms, 
 clean and cosy, and raised from the conmionplace by the rare 
 volumes which were gathered in them, and the fine pieces of 
 j)orcelain standing here and there on their wooden shelves. 
 
 Then, promising to leturn on the morrow, he took his 
 leave. Rosselin walked beside him down the little path to the 
 gate. The sun ha I set and the skies were growing quite dark. 
 The ripple of the Seine water under the sculls of a passing boat 
 •was audible in the stillness. From the distance there came the
 
 2r4 OTHMAR. 
 
 sounds of a violin, and some voices singing the postiMions and 
 travellers' chorus from the ' Manon Lescaut ' of IVIassenet. 
 
 Rosselin, left alone, leaned over his wooden gate between liis 
 acacia hedges, and listened to the voices dying away in the dis- 
 tance, and looked through the soft dusk to where his Paris lay. 
 
 ' 1 wonder if he has told his wife ? ' he thought. * If not — 
 well, if not, perhaps Madame may not care. She has never 
 cared, why should she care now 1 ' 
 
 The interrogation had been on his lips more than once whilst 
 Othmar had been with him, but his Avorldly wisdom had kcjjt it 
 back unspoken. 
 
 ' Eatre Varbre et Vecorce ne mettez pas le doigt,^ was an 
 axiom of which he, so often the exponent of Sganarelle, knew 
 the profound truth. 
 
 Aloud he added : 
 
 * Of course I will see her, and with the greatest pleasure. 
 When and where 1 ' 
 
 ' I will take you to-morrow. I shall remain in Paris two days.' 
 
 ' Then to-morrow I will await you. Do not think me a 
 cynical and indifierent old hermit. If I dread to see youth 
 throw itself into the river of fire which leads to fame, it is only 
 because I have seen so many burned up in its course. I always 
 advocate obscurity for women. Penelope is a much liappier 
 woman than Circe, though the latter is a goddess and a sor- 
 ceress. Your prote'gee may become great only to die like Des- 
 clee, like Rachel. You Avould do her a greater service if you 
 married her to one of your clerks, gave them a modest little 
 house in the banlieue, and became sponsor to their first child. 
 Though I have been a graceless artist all my life, 1 confess I 
 hesitate at being the person to assist such a friendless creature 
 as you describe to enter on a dramatic careei'. I have seen so 
 many failures ! By-the-bye, is she handsome ? ' 
 
 ' She has beauty,' said Othmar a little coldly, because the 
 question slightly confused and irritated him. 
 
 ' It was a needless interrogation,' said Rosselin to himself. 
 Even the chivalry of Othmar would have deemed it necessary 
 to do so much for a plain woman. 
 
 When he went to Les Hameaux on the following day he saw 
 her, heard her, studied her, stayed some two hours near her, now 
 and then reciting to her himself, half a scene from ' Le Joueur,' 
 a single speech from the ' Misanthrope,' a few lines of Feuillet, 
 a few stanzas from the ' Odes et Ballades.' 
 
 ' Oh, who are you ? ' she asked in transport, the tears of 
 delight and admiration rising to her eyes. 
 
 'My dear,' answered Rosselin with a smile, which for once 
 was sad, * I am that most melancholy of all tilings — an artist 
 who was once great and now is old ? ' 
 
 She took his hand with reverence and kissed it.
 
 OTHMAR. 21 S 
 
 ' Fa / ' said the man whom the world had adored, with a 
 'ittle h\ugh which had emotion it. ' Va ! Life is always worth 
 living. The flowers always smell sweet and the sunsliine is 
 always warm. And so you, too, would be an artist, would you ? 
 Well, well ! every spring there are young birds to fill the old 
 nests.' 
 
 When he left her he was long silent. When he at last si^oke, 
 he said briefly to Othmar : ' Elle a de Vavenir.' 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 The day after Othmar went alone to the green shadows of the 
 vale of Port-Royal. It was five o'clock in the afternoon when 
 he reached there : he saw Damaris before she saw him ; all her 
 rural habits and associations had come to her in this leafy and 
 rustic jjlace ; she rose with the sun and went to bed with it ; 
 she had recovered her colour and her strength ; she assisted in 
 the out-of-door work and rejoiced in it. As he drew near he 
 saw her mowing a swath of the autumnal aftermath of the little 
 field, the two watch dogs of Bonaventure, which he had bought 
 and restored to her, lying near and watching her with loving 
 eyes. Her arms, vigorous as a youth's and white as a swan's 
 neck, were seen bare to the shoulder in the swaying sweep of 
 the scythe ; her hair was bound closely round hei- head, and its 
 dark gold glistened in the sun. The veins in her throat stood 
 out in the eflbrt of the movement ; the linen of her bodice 
 heaved and fell. It was an attitude which Rude or Clesinger 
 would have given ten years of their lives t(j reproduce in marble ; 
 it w as the perfection of full and youthful female strength and 
 health, teeming with all the promise of a perfect organisation, 
 all the vitality which makes strong mothers of strong men. 
 
 It was womanhood ; not the womanhood of the mortdaines, 
 delicate and fragile as a hothouse flower, pale from late hours or 
 faintly tinted with the resources of art, serene and harmonious 
 in tone, in charm, in manner, the most perfect of all the pro- 
 ducts of artificial culture ; but womanhood as it was when the 
 earth was young, and when life was simi)le and straight as a rod 
 of hazel ; womanhood buoj'ant, healthful, forceful, fearless ; 
 with limljs uncramped by fashion and beauty ignorant of art, 
 living in the wind, in the water, in the grass, in the sun, like 
 the dappled cattle and the strong-winged bird. 
 
 He Avatched her awhile, himself unseen. AVith what grace, 
 yet with what vigour, she moved the scythe, sweeping round 
 her in its wide semicircle, the long grass falling about her in 
 green billows, with trails of bindweed and tall red heads of 
 clover in it ; beyond her, the blue sky and the pastoral horizon 
 of the vast wheat-fields of La Beauce.
 
 2i6 OTHMAR. 
 
 What would the hot, close, fevered pressure of life in th« 
 world giv^e her that was half so good as that ? How much better 
 to dwell so, between the green grass and the wide sky, than to 
 court the fickle homage and the fleeting loves of men ! How 
 much better if all her years could pass so on the peaceful breast 
 of the kindly earth, living to lead her children out amongst the 
 swaths of hay and teach them to love the lark's song and the 
 face of the fields as she loved them ! How much better to be 
 Baucis than Aspasia ! 
 
 Perhaps ! but where was Philemon ? 
 
 As the thoughts drifted through his mind she paused to whet 
 her scythe, looked up, and saw him. With a smile that was as 
 glad as sunshine in May weather she came towards him, leaping 
 lightly over the hillocks of mown grass. She was happy to see 
 him there. She felt no embarrassment for her bare arms and 
 her kilted skirt ; she had not been taught the immodesty of 
 prudes. 
 
 'No, we will not go in the house,' he said to her when he 
 had greeted her. ' Let us stay in your sweet-smelling meadow. 
 Why are you mowing % Are there no mowers to do it ? ' 
 
 ' I like doing it,' she answered ; ' and it spares Madame 
 Chabot the day's pay of a man. I can mow very well,' she 
 added, with that pride in her pastoral skill which she had been 
 imbued with on Eonaventure. 
 
 She walked on by his side through the little narrow spaces 
 of mown ground Avhich ran between the Avaves of the fallen 
 grasses. She had pulled down her sleeves and taken the pins 
 out of her skirt, and passed with her firm light tread and her 
 uncovered head over the rough soil, with the afternoon sun in 
 her eyes and on the rich tints of her face. It intensified the 
 radiance of her colouring, as it did that of the scarlet poppies 
 which wex-e blowing here and there where the grass still stood 
 uncut. 
 
 ' What did he say of me % ' she asked anxiously and wistfully, 
 as Othmar walked on in silence beside her. 
 
 ' He says you have not deceived yourself.' 
 
 *Ah!' — she drew a deep breath of rehef — 'I pleased him, 
 then ? And yet, when I heard him recite, it seemed to me that 
 I could do notliing more than stutter and gabble foolishly ; his 
 voice was music ' 
 
 ' He lias been a very great artist, and speech is to him as the 
 flute to the flute-player : an instrument with which he does what 
 lie will. Yes, you pleased him, my dear. He thinks that you 
 have in you the soul of an artist, the future of one if you 
 choose.' 
 
 ' Ah ! ' she laughed aloud for sheer happiness and triumph, in 
 the joy and the pride of a child. It seemed to her the most 
 exquisite glad tidings, the most superb success.
 
 OTHMAR. 217 
 
 ' He will even help you ; lie will train you himself ; and 
 whoever is trained by David Rosselin is in a certain sense secure 
 of the public ear,' said Othmar with a reluctance which he felt 
 was unjust to her, for if she possessed this power why should 
 she be denied the knowledge of it? ' But,' he added slowly, 
 ' I must warn you that even he, great artist as he has been, 
 thinks as I think — that it is better to mow grass in the fresh air 
 than to seek the suffrage of crowds in the gaslight. He thinks 
 as I think, that, for a woman, the more secluded and sheltered 
 be the path of life the happier and the better is it for her. This 
 sounds very cold and cautious to j'ou, no doubt ; but it would 
 be what every man of the world would tell you, who was honest 
 witli you, and had your welfare at heart.' 
 
 Her face changed and clouded as she heard him. 
 
 * Why % ' she said abruptly. 
 
 He was silent. It was impossible to tell this child, who was 
 as innocent as any one of the poppies blowing in the grass, all 
 the reasons which made the future she coveted look to him like 
 the open mouth of a furnace into which a white sea-bird was 
 flying in its ignorance. 
 
 ' Private life is the best life,' he said as she reiieated, a little 
 imperiously, her ' why ? ' ' It is the calmest, the simplest, the 
 most screened from envy and hatred. I suppose tranquillity 
 does not seem to you the one inestimable blessing which it really 
 is. You are full of ardours and enthusiasms and longings, as 
 the vines are full of sap in the springtime. You want the wine 
 of life, because you clo not know that the intoxication of it 
 is always coupled with nausea, and fever, and unspeakable dis- 
 gust. It is of no use saying this to you, because you are so 
 young ; but it is true. If I could compel your future, I would 
 have it pass yonder, where, far away, we see that golden haze. 
 There are the great wheat-lands of La Tieauce, and the thrift 
 and the peace and the abundance of a rich pastoral life. If you 
 spent your little fortune on a farm there, with your love of 
 country sights and sounds and ways, you would be happy ; and 
 you could take your choice from the many gallant youths who 
 reap the harvests of those plains. You would be a rich demoi- 
 selle in La Beauce, but in the world of art you may be poor, my 
 dear, for all your gifts from nature. We are poor, very poor, 
 forever, when once we have failed.' 
 
 His own words sounded in his ears unkind, unsympathetic, 
 harsh, and almost coarse ; but he spoke as, it seemed to him, 
 both experience and conscience made it duty to do. Damaris 
 looked down on the shorn grass at her feet, and he saw her fa 
 and throat grow red. 
 
 ' If I had wished to marry I would have married my cousin,' 
 ehe said with a sound of anger and offence in her voice. ' Pea- 
 sant life is good, very good. Perhaps, if I had never seen any-
 
 2i8 OTHMAR. 
 
 thing diflerent, it might have seemed always the best. But not 
 now — not now ' 
 
 ' But you do not know .' He left his reply unfinished. 
 
 Standing in the green warm meadow, with the light of after- 
 noon slied on it, and the golden haze of a late summer day on 
 its horizon, his thoughts were full of all the many things in life 
 of which she could imagine nothing. All the jsassions and 
 pleasures and disgusts, all the deskes and satisfactions and 
 satieties, all the tumult and A^anity and nausea and giddy liaste 
 of life in the world — what could she tell of these \ She would 
 be handsome and young and alone ; what would that world not 
 teach her in a year, a month, an hour ? Self-consciousness 
 first ; then, Avith that knowledge, all else. 
 
 As, to her, having never known anything but the close limits 
 of peasant life, the world which she did not know assumed the 
 colours and the rejoicing of a vast borealis pageantiy, so to him, 
 by Avhom the world was known like an oft-read Virgil, it seemed 
 tliat the safety, the quietude, the daily round of simple duties, 
 undisturbed by ambition within or by contention from without, 
 which the life of tlie peasant afibrded, was a kind of happiness, 
 a positive security from Avhich any safe Avithin it Averc ill-advised 
 to Avander. 
 
 Of all wretched creatures the declassee seemed to him to be 
 the most wretched. He had reproached his Avife with the effort 
 to make tliis child one of those pitiful anomalies, and he now 
 reproached Iiimself with doing the same unkindness. 
 
 Damaris Avas a declassee ; she could never more return to the 
 order of life Avhence she had come. Ever since some indistinct 
 glory for herself had been suggested to her by the thoughtless 
 Avords of the great lady Avho had represented Fate to her, she 
 had been haunted by the desire for an existence Avholly unlike 
 that to Avhich she had been born and by Avhich she liad been sur- 
 rounded. It had been onl}^ a very few hours Avhicli she had 
 passed under the roof of St. Pharamond, but that short spac3 
 had been long enougli to make her conceive a Avorld Avliolly 
 inconceivable to her before, a Avorld in Avhich art and luxury 
 Avere things of daily liabit, in Avhich leisure and loA^eliness and 
 gaiety and ease were matters of course, like the coming and 
 going of time, in Avhich personal graces and personal charm 
 were all cultured as the floAvers Avcre cultured under glass ; in 
 Avliich even for her there might become jiossible the fruition of 
 all manner of gorgeous indefinite visions, born out of the sug- 
 gestions of poets and the phantasmagoria of romantic books — a 
 Avorld in Avhich all she had humbly longed for, as she had listened 
 to the nightingales in the orange thickets, Avould become visible 
 to her and possessed. 
 
 She Avas a declassee : not in the vulgar sense, but in the sadder 
 meaning of a young life uprooted from its natural soil and filled
 
 OTHMAR. 219 
 
 ■with desires, aspirations, dreams, which made all that was 
 actually within her grasp valueless to her. That one night, in 
 Avhich she had seen around her the destinies which appeared to 
 her like a tale of fairy-land, had impressed her imagination with 
 indelible memories and her heart with ineffaceable wishes. He, 
 who only saw in the life of his own world tedium, inanity, 
 stupidity, extravagance, monotonous repetition, could not guess 
 what enchantment its externals had worn to her. He, who was 
 tired of the unvaried paths of that garden of pleasure whose 
 habitues only see that in it ' grove nods to grove, each alley has 
 its fellow,' could not divine what a paradise it had looked to this 
 young waif and stray, who had been only able to catch one 
 glimpse of its beauties through the golden bars of its shut gates. 
 To him her wish for the world appeared the most pathetic of 
 errors, the most pitiable of blunders, a very madness of unwise 
 choice. Had not the world been with him always, and what 
 had it given him % Possibly it had in reality given him much 
 more than he remembered : it had given him culture with all 
 its charms, and courtesy with all its graces ; it had given him 
 the great powers wdiich lie in wealth, and the great light which 
 shines from knowledge. But then he was so used to these he 
 counted them not, and the world only wore to him the aspect of 
 a monster devouring all leisure, all simplicity, all repose, driving 
 all mankind before it in a breathless chase of swiftly escaping 
 hours ; and to her this monster would be ravenous as a wolf, 
 cruel as it could never be to any man ! It would take every- 
 thing from her, and only give her in return worthless gifts of 
 ruinous passions, of consuming fevers, of poisoned fruits, of tierce 
 desires. 
 
 It seemed to him as if he saw some young child coming gaily 
 through the grasses, clasping all unconscious to its breast a mass 
 of smoking dynamite, and deeming it a kindly playfellow. 
 
 And it was imi^ossible to warn her in words brutal enough 
 to scare her from her purpose. He could not say to ]ier, ' Men 
 are beasts, and women are worse : there are hideous pleasures, 
 hateful appetites, cruel temptations, of which you know nothing, 
 but which will all crowd on your knowledge and grow to your 
 taste, once you are in the midst of them. The world will 
 embrace you, but as the bull embraced the Christian maiden 
 forced to appear as Pasiphae in the circus of Nero. Be wise 
 while there is time. Stay in the clean, clear daylight f f a 
 country life. Its paths are narrow and few, they only 'eil 
 from the hearth to the door, from the door to the brook or the 
 mill ; but you may walk in them safe and content, and teach 
 your children to follow your steps. Peace of mind is the 
 Bweetest thing upon earth ; but it is like the wood-sorrel, it 
 only grows in shady, quiet, homely places. No one has it in 
 the world.'
 
 220 OTHMAR. 
 
 But lie thought these thoughts, and did not say them. Ha 
 looked at her standing with dew-wet feet amongst the seeding 
 grasses, the warm fresh air about her, the blue sky above, and 
 he thought of her in the atmosphere of a supper-room in Paris, 
 with the smoke, and the perfumes, and the odours of the wines, 
 and beside her men with swimming lascivious eyes, and drolesses 
 with flushed faces and indecent gestures. He would not take 
 her there, but others would. 
 
 She raised her head suddenly and looked at him. 
 
 ' What are you afraid of for me 1 ' she said suddenly. ' There 
 is nothing to be afraid of. If I fail I fail ; I have enough 
 always to live on, you say ; and if I succeed ' 
 
 ' Failure will not hurt you,' he said coldly ; ' success may.' 
 
 ' How can success hurt one unless one be very vain or very 
 weak ? I do not think I am vain, and I know I am strong. ' 
 
 ' My dear — you can go from the meadows to the world if 
 you will, but remember you cannot come back from the world 
 to the meadows.' 
 
 ' Why 'I Did not many come from the world to Port-Riiyal 
 when it stood yonder 1 ' 
 
 ' Yes ; they came with sick hearts, with defeated hojies, 
 with aching wounds, with disappointed passions ; but they 
 never stood in the green pastures, in the morning of life, again.' 
 
 There was a sigh in the words which brought them home to 
 her heart with a sudden sense of all their meaning. 
 
 She was mute w hile the little crickets in the stalks of the 
 hay grass sung their last little song of one note, which would 
 soon end with the end of their tiny lives. 
 
 ' You are not happy yourself ? ' she said after awhile. 
 Astonishment and regret were in the question. 
 
 Othmav hesitated. His sincerity combated the negative, 
 which a vague sense of loyalty to one absent made him desirous 
 to utter. 
 
 * No one after a certain age is happy, my dear,' he answered 
 evasively. ' Illusions are happiness ; and in the world which you 
 think must be a fairy tale, we lose them very quickly.' 
 
 ' I should have thought you were happy,' she said regret- 
 fully ; that splendid pageantry of life of which she had seen a 
 glimpse seemed to her magical, marvellous, inexhaustible. 
 
 ' I did not think she was,' she added, with that directness 
 and candour which made her great unlikeness to all of her sex 
 wh<;m he had ever known. 
 
 ' Why ? ' he asked abruptly ; the supposition annoyed him. 
 
 ' She looked tired, and as if she were looking for something 
 she did not find.' 
 
 The .accuracy and divination in the words surprised him. 
 How had this child, who had never before seen any woman of 
 the world, guessed so accurately the perpetual vague desire and
 
 OTHMAR. 221 
 
 as vague dissatisfaction which had always gone with the soul of 
 his wife as a shadow goes through brilliant light ? 
 
 All her life long Nadege had found the old saw true, familiarity 
 had bred contempt in her ; custom had made wisdom seem 
 foolishness, wit seem prose, amusement become tedium, and 
 interest change to apathy. Intimate knowledge of anything, of 
 anyone, had always altered each for her, as the fairy gold 
 changed in mortal hands to withered leaves. 
 
 It was no fault of hers ; it was not even mere inconstancy of 
 temper ; it was rather due to the infinitude of her inexhaustible 
 expectations and the microscopic penetration of her intelligence. 
 The world was small to her as to Alexander. 
 
 He knew that neither to her nor to himself had their life 
 together been that poem, that passion, that harmony which they 
 — or he at least — had imagined that it would be. But was not 
 this due only to that doom of human nature which they shared 
 in common with all the rest of mankind ? Was it not merely 
 the effect of that lassitude and vague disappointment which 
 must follow on the indulgence of every great passion, simply 
 because in its supreme hours it reaches heights of rapture at 
 Avhich nothing human can remain % 
 
 Yet, however his philosophy may explain it, to have any 
 other imagine that he does not render a woman who belongs to 
 him perfectly contented with him always irritates and offends 
 every man. It is a suspicion cast on his powers, his loyalty, 
 and his good sense : it indirectly accuses him of deficiency in 
 attraction or of feebleness of character. Othmar had but litile 
 vanity ; no more than human natr.ro naturallj' i^ossesses in ils 
 unconscious forms of self-love ; but the little he had was morti- 
 fied by this child's observation. She, ignorant of all th? fine 
 intricacies of emotion which are the traits of such highly-cul- 
 tured and over-refined temperaments as were theirs, could only 
 say, in her simple and inadequate language, that they seemed 
 to her ' not happy.' It ivas not the phrase which expressed what 
 they lacked; it was too homely, too crude, too direct, to describe 
 the complicated world-weariness of which they both suffered the 
 penalties, the innumerable and conflicting sentiments and de- 
 sires which made of their lives a continual vague expectation 
 and as vague and continual a regret. But her young eyes, un- 
 used as they were to read anything less clear than the open 
 language of sea and sky, and ignorant of the whole meaning of 
 psychological analysis, had yet been able to perceive the shadow 
 of this which she had had no power of understanding. 
 
 He was surprised at her penetration, whilst he wondered 
 uneasily if the world in general, so much keener of sight and 
 more bitter of tongue than she, saw as much as she saw. The idea 
 that it might be so was unwelcome to him. The supposition 
 was horrible to him that the great passion of his life had gone
 
 222 OTHMAR. 
 
 the way of most great passions which are exposed to that most 
 cruel of all slow destroyers— familiarity ; familiarity which is as 
 the mildew to the wheat, as the sirdax to the fir-tree, as the 
 calandra to the sugar-cane. He loathed to realise the fact, or 
 think of it in any way ; and when it was placed before him by 
 another's observation, he saw his own soul, as it were in a 
 mirror, and detested what he saw. 
 
 He answered with some constraint : ' I have told you, my 
 dear, that happiness is the fruit of illusions ; it cannot exist 
 without them any more than we could have that beautiful hr'ze 
 yonder without water in the atmosphere. Besides, in the world, 
 people are only content so long as they are of completely frivo- 
 lous characters. My wife has cultivated her intelligence and 
 her wit too exquisitely to be capable of that sort of coarse and 
 common satisfaction with things as they are which is so easy to 
 mediocre minds.' 
 
 ' Yet you advise me to be content % ' 
 
 ' My dear child, you are young, you are accustomed to an 
 out-of-door life, you have the felicity of belonging to country 
 things and country thoughts which give you a stoi'ehouse full of 
 sunny memories. My wife is a mondaine (if you have ever 
 heard that word) who is also a pessimist and a metaphysician. 
 Life presents many inti'icate problems to her mind which will, I 
 hope, never trouble your joyous acceptance of it as it is. Fe'nelon, 
 I assure you, was a happier man than Lamennais.' 
 
 ' Because he was a stupider one.' 
 
 ' Stupid 1 No, but simpler, cast in a difierent mould, natu- 
 rally inclined to faith, averse to sj^eculation, taking things as 
 he found them without question. That is the cast of mind of 
 all men and women who are made to be happy.' 
 
 She was silent ; wishfully thinking of those immense fields of 
 knowledge shut out from her own eyes like the aerial spheres of 
 unseen suns and planets which the unassisted sight can never be- 
 hold. She felt childish, ignoi'ant, made of dull and common clay. 
 
 The bells of a little distant spire sounded for Vespers. The 
 sun was sinking beyond the edge of the wide green plain. A 
 deeper stillness was stealing over the meadow and the low 
 cop})ices which made its boundaries. Birds, looking grey in tlie 
 shadows, liew low, to and fro, restlessly, in that uncertain tliglit 
 with which, near nightfall, they always seek a resting-place for 
 the dark hours. 
 
 Othiiiar looked at his watch. ' I must leave you or I shall 
 miss the train to Paris, and I go to-night to Russia.' 
 
 She changed colour. 
 ' To Russia ! That is very far away ! ' 
 
 ' It does not seem so in these days. One sleeps and Avakes 
 and sleeps again, and one is there. If you want me in any 
 way, write to me at the Paris house and they will forward your
 
 OTHMAR. 223 
 
 letter. Rosselin will come to see you to-morrow. He will tell 
 you, as no one else can, all you will have to prepare for and 
 encounter if you choose the life of an artist. Do not decide 
 too hastily. There is no hurry. I like best to think of you in 
 these safe pastures.' 
 
 ' But tlie winter will come to them and— some time— to me 1 ' 
 
 ' It is far enough otF you, at least, to be forgotten. Well, 
 listen to Eosselin and be guided by your OAvn impulses ; they 
 are the only safe guides in such a choice as this. I dare say the 
 world will win you ; the world always does. It is only in fable 
 that Herakles goes with Pallas. Adieu.' 
 
 She grew very pale, and the light had gone out of her face 
 as it had now gone oft" the landscape. 
 
 ' You will come back soon ? ' she asked. 
 
 Othmar resisted a wave of tenderness and pity which passed 
 over him. 
 
 'Not very soon,' he answered. 'You know I have many 
 occupations, and the world I warn you against is always with 
 me, alas ! I shall never be able to see you often, my dear, for — 
 for — very many reasons ; but whenever you really need me, 
 write to me without hesitation, and always depend upon the 
 sincerity pf my regard.' 
 
 She did not reply. She stood motionless. With the coming 
 of the evening shadows there had came a great chillness, a sense 
 of loss upon her, as if she had been suddenly brought from the 
 warm green meadows of the vale of Chevreuse into the awful 
 silence and whiteness and frozen solitude of a winter's night in 
 Siberia. 
 
 ' Write to me,' said Othmar again. With a gentle movement 
 he stooped and kissed her on the soft thick waves of hair which 
 fell over her forehead. 
 
 Then he left her. 
 
 She remained standing in the same place and the same 
 attitude, her feet in the mown grass growing wet with dew, her 
 head bent like a statue of meditation. The caress had been 
 gentle, slight, passionless, like a kiss to a child ; but her face 
 and bosom had grown hut with blushes which the evening shadows 
 veiled, and a strange vague joy and pain strove together in her. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 It was eight o'clock in the evening on the plains of Russ'a, and 
 warm with that Asiatic heat whicli comes with the reign of the dog- 
 star even to the provinces that lie between the Baltic waters aud 
 the Ural snows. In the vast gardens and white wide courts of the 
 house at Zaraila the evening was sultry, and Nadege, spending a 
 few dull days in her annual visit to her elder children and their
 
 224 OTHMAR. 
 
 estates, was lying half asleep upon a couch, listening to the 
 monotonous drip of the lion-fountain in the central court, and 
 thinking of nothing in especial. This visit had always repre- 
 sented to her supreme and unmitigated tedium. It was a duty 
 to come there no doubt ; her duties were docile courtiers as a 
 rule and seldom troubled her ; but it was tiresome, infinitely 
 tiresome, it was so much time lost out of the sum of her life. 
 Why is duty never agreeable ? 
 
 The Napraxine children were in their own apartments ; the 
 clear sunny evening, whose light would stretch almost to dawn, 
 illumined the gardens and terraces. She reclined motionless 
 upon her broad low couch, with a little cigarette between her 
 lips, now and then sending into the air around her delicate rings 
 of rose-scented smoke. The mother of Platon Napraxine, a 
 woman old and austere, with the terrible austerity of women 
 who have loved pleasure and passion, and only turned to devo- 
 tion when both have deserted them, sat near and watched her 
 with dark, brooding, sunken eyes, full of a hate which the 
 object of it was too indifferent and too careless to care for or to 
 measure. 
 
 The Princess Lobow Gregorievna, born a Princess Miliutine, 
 was a woman who had been handsome, but had now lost nearly 
 all trace of past beauty. She was spare, colourless, and at- 
 tenuated, and her severe, straight profile, and her expression of 
 ascetic rigidity, gave her a curious likeness to those Byzantine 
 portraits of St. Anne and of St. Elizabeth which were sur- 
 rounded with jewels and relics on the altars of her private 
 chapel. Her piety in old age was as complete and absorbing as 
 her licentious amours had been in her earlier womanhood. 
 Superstition had taken the same empire over her in age which 
 her passions had possessed previously ; and she was as extrava- 
 L'ant in her donations to church and convent as she had once 
 been to the impecunious officers of the guard and princely 
 i,amblers, who had been iu turn favoured with her fantastic 
 i nd short-lived preference. Her religious and most orthodox 
 fervour was neither a mask nor an hyix)crisj\ It was the most 
 genuine of all religions — that which is founded on personal fear. 
 But it intensified the hardness of her temper, and never whiS' 
 pered to her that mercy might be holier than long prayers. 
 
 In all Europe Othniar and his wife had no enemy colder, 
 harder, more implacable than this holy woman, whose name 
 meant Love, and whose good works were seen in endowed con- 
 vents, jewelled reliques, mighty treasures bestowed all over her 
 province, and ceremonials, fasts, and penances of the orthodox 
 most rigidly observed in her person. Nadoge never tried to 
 conciliate or propitiate her grim foe ; she was at once too care- 
 less and too courageous. With her delicate and tuisparing 
 raillery she had stung this enmity with many a barbed word,
 
 OTHMAR. 225 
 
 subtle and negligent and penetrating, accentuated with the cruel 
 sweet music of her laughter, until the hatred with which the 
 Princess Lobow hated her was deep as the Volga, though hidden 
 like the Volga's bottomless holes so long as Platon Napraxine 
 had lived. His death had given it justitication, and intensified 
 it a thousandfold. 
 
 ' If she were a good woman she would be compelled to hate 
 me,' thought the object of her hate. ' And being what she is, 
 if she could poison me secretly she would do it, even in the 
 blessed bread itself.' 
 
 When they had first met after her marriage with Othmar, 
 there had been said between them such words as are ineifaceable 
 on the memory like vitriol tiung on the face. 
 
 ' For the first time in my life I have allowed myself to be 
 in a rage ; je me suh encanaillceJ' she had said to herself, 
 penitent not for the anger into which she had been driven, but 
 for the force with which she had uttered it, Avhich was an oflence 
 against her canons of good taste. 
 
 The earlier years of the Princess Lobow had been dedicated 
 to all those refined ingenuities of dejiravity in which the nine- 
 teenth centuiy can rival the Rome of Vitellius and the Con- 
 stantinople of the Byzantine emperors. There were terrible 
 facts in her past, ready, like so many knives, to the use of her 
 opponent, allusions which could pierce like steel, and could scar 
 like flame. Nadfege had spared none of them. With all the 
 pitiless disdain of a woman in whom the senses have but very 
 faint power, she had poured out her scorn on tlie other, whose 
 senses had been her tyrants until, virtuous perforce through the 
 chills of age, she had taken her worthless withered soul to God. 
 
 Since that time the bitterest enmity had been open and 
 avowed between them. Concession to the world, and regarci to 
 the dead man's memory, caused them to still keep up a show 
 and aspect of conventional politeness befoi'e others. But the 
 polished surface covered the most bitter feud. They were 
 studiously ceremonious and courteous one to the other ; but 
 beneath the few phrases they exchanged, often trivial and ap- 
 parently amiable as these might be, there were a hint, a tone, a 
 meaning which told to each of the other's undying animosity. 
 To the younger woman it was a matter of pure indiflerence, of 
 careless amusement ; her nature was too capricious and too dis- 
 dainful to cherish deep enmities ; she despised rather than she 
 disliked ; but to the elder this hatred she cherished was the last 
 flickering flame of the many hot passions which had governed 
 her in earlier years. For her only son she had had a concen- 
 trated intensity of aflection, into which all the ambition, 
 cupidity, and love of dominion in her character had been 
 united. His marriage had been hateful to hei% and when 
 Nadine, in lier sixteenth year, as fragile as an orchid and as 
 
 Q
 
 226 OTHMAR. 
 
 impertinent as Cherubino, petulantly detesting the husband 
 they had given her, and in the bitterness of her disillusions at 
 war with all the world, was brought in the first months of her 
 marriage to the great house of Zaraila, the Princess Lobow had 
 seen in her not only the despoiler of her own power, but the 
 ruin of her son. 
 
 Many and violent had been the scenes between Platon 
 Napraxine and herself, of which his wife was the object and the 
 cause. 
 
 ' She is a crj^stal of ice, you say,' she told him a hundred 
 times. ' Well, she will so cliill your heart one day that it will 
 be numb for ever. Remember that ; I warn you.' 
 
 He did remember when he went out to his death in the 
 dawn of the April morning at Versailles. 
 
 Whilst he lived his mother's hatred for his wife was impo- 
 tent and perforce mute ; but all the many slights, the constant 
 indifference, the frequent ridicule of wliich he was the object, 
 though unperceived or forgiven by him, were written on his 
 mother's memory indelibly as on tablets of stone. All the 
 coquetries and scandals which were associated with his wife's 
 name, all the tragedies for which the breath of her world made 
 her responsible, all the cruel words and strange caprices which 
 were attributed to her, were gathered up and treasured by the 
 Princess Lobow. Seldom leaving her solitudes in the provinces, 
 and seldom seen even in Petersburg, she yet was as accurately 
 informed of all the gossip of Europe concerning her daughter- 
 in-law as though she had lived perpetually beside her. None 
 of the minutice of the vaguest rumours about her escaped the 
 vigilance of her enemy. Saint though she was, she prayed 
 passionately that some imprudence greater than usual, some 
 coquetry which would pass beyond the patience of her husband 
 and her world, would deliver Nadege Federowna into her 
 hands, but she waited in vain. The indulgence of both the 
 world and the husband was inexhaustible for one to whom they 
 were both of the most absolute insignificance. 
 
 Then one day, as falls a bolt from a clear sky, a single line 
 by the electric wires told her that her son was dead. 
 
 In her eyes he was murdered by his wife, as surely as 
 though she had touched his lips with poison. 
 
 Her grief and her rage were terrible : the more terrible 
 because the hatred which might have assuaged it had no outlet 
 in action, could scarce have any in speech. 
 
 For Platon Napraxine had left his young sons wholly in 
 the hands of their mother, and she could take them whither 
 she would, and do with them whatever she chose ; and the 
 older woman, who had transferred to them all that jealous and 
 violent attachment Avhich she had given their father, concealed 
 all she felt that she might retain them near her, whilst the
 
 OTHMAR. '227 
 
 secretiveness and ruses of the Slav temperament made it pos- 
 sible for lier to continue in apparent friendship before the world 
 with one whom she looked on as his destroj-er. 
 
 She sat now erect on an antii^ue chair of gilded and 
 painted leather, and through her droj^ped eyelids watched the 
 indolent attitude, the profound idleness, the outstretched limbs, 
 like those of a reposing Diana, of the woman she loathed. In 
 all the attitude, from the smis gene and complete ease of it to 
 the little rose-scented puffs of smoke which ever and again 
 came from her parted lips, there was that ' note of modernity ' 
 which beyond all other things the Princess Lobow detested. 
 The women of her time had been as licentious as the great 
 Catharine herself, but they had been different to the cucudettes 
 in manner, in mind, in opinion, in everything. They had been 
 likfi fierce Oriental empresses, often barbarous, uncleanly, gross, 
 but they had had a stateliness which all their excesses could 
 not impair. The modem woman of the world, Avith her care- 
 less attitudes, her mockery of all ceremonial, her disrespect for 
 tradition and etiquette, her airy scepticism, and her vague dis- 
 satisfaction, was, Avherever she was met with, an enigma and an 
 atiront to the elder woman, whose own life had been divided 
 between strong vices and strong faiths, and whose bigotry 
 and whose sensuality had been of equal force. They had 
 neither senses nor souls, these poor modern anemiques, thought 
 tbis woman of seventy years, who had been a Messalina and 
 who had become a St. Katherine. 
 
 ' Ah, you despise us, ,madame ; how right you are ! ' 
 Nadege had said to her once. ' We never know what we wish, 
 and when we get what we ask for, we are as irritated as when 
 it is denied to us. It is the fault of all culture — it creates dis- 
 content and fastidiousness as surely as civilisatioix biings all 
 kinds of new diseases. I only wish that we could be like oiir 
 granddames and godmothers, who had no earthly ideals beyond 
 a constant succession of big officers of cuirassiers, and no mental 
 doubt whatever as to the existence of a " bon Dieu." It must 
 have simplified life so much to have been able to balance the 
 little weakness for the succession of cuirassiers with such a 
 perfect confidence in Heaven ! ' 
 
 At this moment in the sumnier evening at Zaraila neither of 
 them were speaking. They had exchanged many cruel, cour- 
 teous innuendoes in the course of the day, but with the evening 
 there had come a tacit truce. The little boys were wholly 
 under the power of their mother as their guardian, and their 
 grandmother feared that if she were too much irritated she 
 might remove them from Zaraila or request her to leave it. 
 Nadine, on her side, had thought, with a sense of compas- 
 sion and that disdainful but candid justice which was seldom 
 wanting in her : ' After all, as sh* k»ved that poor, big, clumsy
 
 228 OTHMAR. 
 
 fellow so well, antl he was her only son — the only thing she 
 had — it is pardonable, it is natural, that she should hate me for 
 ever.' 
 
 It grew late, but it was still light with the long and radiant 
 evening of the north in summer. She, in the drowsy heat of 
 the eventide, looked with still dreamy ej^es out on to the sultry 
 gardens beneath, where golden evening light was poured on 
 endless aisles and fields of roses, and groves of feathery bananas 
 and plumed palms ; the vegetation of the vales of Kashmere 
 made by art to blossom there for the brief season of a Russian 
 summer. 
 
 ' How very foolish women are to fear absence,' she thought. 
 ' Absence is the only possible avenue which can lead us to find 
 the fontaine de jouvence of renewed interest. Familiarity is so 
 fatal — so fatal ! Helen's self would be unable to hold her own 
 against it. Those silly women who let the man they love enter 
 their chamber as easily as he can go into his racing stables, set 
 a great grey ghost of indifference at the threshold. Most 
 Avomen are afraid of not being near what they love. If they 
 only knew how distance helps them ; how constant proximity 
 hurts them ! If Love cannot keep a few surprises in his pocket, 
 he is as tiresome as a newspaper a week old.' 
 
 She laughed a little, watching the leaves of a full-blown 
 rose fall under the touch of an alighting bird. 
 
 ' When it has once been f uU-blown,' she thought, ' any 
 touch — even a bird's, even a butterfly's — will serve to finish it 
 for ever.' 
 
 Love was so like that great crimson rose, which a moment 
 before had been a cup of ruby-coloured fragrance, and now was 
 a mere litter of drojiped leaves upon the grass. Love lives by 
 its emotions, its desires, its illusions: so long as these can be 
 excited and sustained it is Love ; when they cannot be so, it is 
 as the Spanish poet said centuries ago, habit, friendship, what 
 you will, but not Love any more. 
 
 She had studied the natures of men too profoundly not to 
 know this. 
 
 There was the sound of wheels in the central court, and 
 various doors opened and shut in the apartments leading to the 
 grand salon where they were. Then the groom of the cham- 
 bers, in his l>lack uniform, only relieved by his silver chain of 
 office and tlie key embroidered on his collar, preceded and 
 announced Othmar. 
 
 Nadine half rose, leaning on one arm on the cushion. 
 
 'My dear Otho, tliis is charming of j-ou ! I did not expect 
 you until to-morrow,' she said, witli a smile of welcome, as .'^ho 
 jjut out her left liand to him. Othmar kissed her fingers with' 
 warmth and deference, then saluted with ceremony tlic Princes* 
 Lobow.
 
 OTHMAR. 229 
 
 * I came from Moscow more quickl}' than 1 could have hoped 
 to do,' he said, as ho seated liimself beside his wife. 'An 
 Imperial train was leaving for tlie north, and the Grand Duke 
 Alexis ofiered me a place in it. Are you well % It is three 
 months and more since we met. ' 
 
 ' I am as well as it is ever permitted one to be in a century 
 in which the nerves play the most prominent role. And the 
 cliildren ? ' 
 
 ' Perfectly well, and perfectly happy. They are not yet at 
 the age of nerves. But I have telegraphed all news to you ; 
 there is nothing left to say, except that absence ' 
 
 ' Oh, do not make me complunents like a hcrger d'ecentail ! 
 We will take all that for granted.' 
 
 The reproof to him was the same sort of mockery with 
 which she had been always Vvont to repress the attempts at 
 tenderness of Naprasine ; but his mother, listening, heard the 
 difference in the accent, and watching, saw the difference in 
 the smile with which they were spoken. 
 
 ' The wanton ! ' she thought bitterly ; ' she expected him to- 
 iiiglit, though she said not till to-morrow, it was for him, that 
 attitude like a Diane endurmie, that coquette's disarray, that 
 studied disorder of laces and gauzes, that little bouquet of helio- 
 trope fastened just above the left breast ! Oh, the beast, the 
 beast ! All that belonged to my son — every atom of it, from her 
 little ear to her slender foot, and should have been burnt with 
 him, like the Indian women, if I could have had my way — should 
 have been buried with him, like his stars and his crosses. Oh, 
 the beast, the beast ! if I could only wring her neck ! ' 
 
 Then she rose, and murmuring some words inaudible and 
 
 ndifterent to her companions, she left the apartment. Otlimar, 
 
 alone beside his wife in the aiomatic warmth of i.he summer 
 
 evening, bent over her couch and kissed her little bouquet of 
 
 heliotrope. 
 
 ' Allons, herger!' she cried, with a little resistance which was 
 not displeasure. 
 
 It pleased her that she had the power to make her husband 
 her lover ; that she could still see him moved to the folies des 
 bergers. It was a point of vanity with her, as well as an impulse 
 of the heart, to retain something of that empire over him which 
 had once been so absolute. When she should wholly cease to be 
 able to do so, it seemed to her that she would be grown old 
 indeed. She had never put more coquetry, more sorcery, more 
 arb concealed by art into her efforts to blind and enslave her 
 lovers, than she had done that evening when she was awaiting 
 Othmar after three months' absence. It miglit not be the 
 highest form of love, but it was the ablest. It was of a piece 
 with that magic by which Cleopatra defied lime, and changed 
 the ravages of habit into philtres of fresh charm.
 
 210 OTHMAR. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 Othmae did not tell her that night of Damaris. 
 
 "With daylight he remembered uneasily that it was a story 
 which should be told. A certain nervousness came over him 
 -vvhenevei he thought of her possible, her probable, laughter , 
 the incredulity as to his motives which she would be sure, out 
 of mirth, to affect if she were too unlike other women to in 
 seriousness entertain it. He recalled the tone with which she 
 had spoken of his escort of the girl to her island, and he shrank 
 from hearing the same tone again. He felt that, if heard, it 
 would anger him unreasonably, perhaps move him to the utter- 
 ance of that kind of words which are most fatal to friendship, 
 harmony, or love. 
 
 The lovely Diane endormie, who had received him with so 
 sweet a smile, could, when aroused, select and speed arrows 
 from hei quiver which could pierce deep and rankle long. 
 
 It seemed to him impossible to tell her that for Aveeks his 
 house had been the home of Damaris Berarde without awaking 
 all those ironies and all tliat disdain which were always so very 
 near the surface in her nature that they were displayed upon 
 the slightest provocation. He would certainly seem to her to 
 have behaved with needless exaggeration, with uncalled-for 
 chivalry. Paris was wide enough to furnish other asylums than 
 his own hcuse ; his means were large enough and powerful 
 enough to have obtained friends for a desolate girl without be- 
 coming hex chief friend himself. Away from the pathos and 
 charm of Damaris's fate, of her perfect trust in himself, and of 
 her childish courage and candour of character, what he liad 
 done seemed even to him, himself, unnecessarily personal in its 
 care ot her. He did not regret it ; he would not have done less 
 if he had had to do it again ; yet he was conscious that to 
 induce his wife to see his actions in the light in which he 
 honestly saw them would be difhcult, probably impossible. 
 
 This day drifted by, and another, and another ; and the 
 name of Damaris did not pass his lips. 
 
 She had for him the sanctity of innocence, of youth, and of 
 siiin'cme misfortune ; he felt that he could not trust himself to 
 have her made the target for the silver arrows of his wife's ■wit. 
 True, there might be moments in which she would be so com- 
 passiiinate and generous, Ihat the calamities of the child whom 
 she had tempted from her safe solitiules would find in her a 
 frank and generous friend. But Othmar knew women too wpll 
 not to know that she wouhl only have been so had he himself 
 had nothing to do with the fate of this waif and stray ; if she, 
 and not himself, had found her adrift in the streets of Paris.
 
 OTHMAR. 231 
 
 * She would doubt my motives and ridicule my endeavours,' 
 he thought, and the fear of her slight, chill laughter was strong 
 upon him. He knew that she would be unsparing in her sar- 
 casms upon himself, even if she should chance to feel any 
 remnant of her momentary interest in the future Desclee of her 
 prophecies. 
 
 He could not forget the coldness and scorn with which she 
 had treated his regret and remorse at Amj'ot ; he could not 
 forget the aching sense of loneliness and loss with which she had 
 allowed him to leave her presence on the night when he had 
 told her of the little verses wliich he had found in the closed 
 chambers of Yseulte. He almost resented with a sense of weak- 
 ness and unworthiness in himself, the empii'e wliich she possessed 
 over his senses, the self-oblivion into wliich she had the power 
 to draw liim when she chose. 
 
 He was sensible that he lost all dignity in her eyes, because 
 he Avas so willing to forgive, so easy to be recalled, so spaniel- 
 like in his too meek acceptance of her slights, and too eager 
 gratitude for her capricious tenderness. 
 
 The first hours passed of that dominion which she could 
 always exercise over him at will, the sense of his own weakness 
 returned to him with humiliation. He was conscious that he 
 must appear unmanly and feeble to her, since he allowed her to 
 play with him thus at her whim and pleasure. At Amyot she 
 had been unkind, disdainful, contemptuous ; if he condoned her 
 cruelty, and accepted her commands, did he not seem to her no 
 higher than the Siberian greyhound Avhich it was her fancy one 
 moment to adorn and caress, and which the next was abandoned 
 and forgotten ? 
 
 He knew that a lover may obey the varying shades of his 
 mistress's temper without unmanliness, but that in marriage 
 such humility and obedience on the man's side are fatal to his 
 peace and self-respect. If he had had the strength of character 
 from the first to resist her influence, and enforce his own, he 
 might have had empire over her ; now he felt that he would 
 never gain it, that on her side alone was all that immense power 
 of command, and of superiority, wliich in human love always 
 remains with the one who loves least. He had too long allowed 
 her to treat him as she treated her hawk in the falconiy-parties 
 at Amj'ot, whistling the bird to her wrist and casting it oft" down 
 the wind with wanton unstable fancies, for him now to take that 
 place in her esteem, and that dignity in her sight, which he had 
 lost through his too fond and too submissive idolatry of her. 
 He had only of late grown conscious of this, and the sudden 
 perception of his own error was full of bitterness and useless 
 regret. 
 
 ' He resents the power I have over him,' she thought, ' and 
 he is thinking of something which he does not say.'
 
 233 OJHMAR. 
 
 She had never expected him to vary with her varying moods. 
 When she was cold, she had always seen liim unhappy ; when 
 she had chided his warmth, he had always remained her adorer. 
 That any shadow from her own indifference which had fallen 
 like night across the paths of others should ever touch her.-'elf, 
 seemed to her impossible, intolerable, almost grotesque ; that 
 she could ever cease to be his sun and moon, his planet, and 
 his fixed star, seemed to her as improbable as that the earth 
 w^ould cease to revolve. 
 
 Her pliilosophic wit had indeed predicted the time when the 
 fate which overtakes all joassion would overtake his, and end it, 
 but in her inmost soul that time had seemed to her remote as 
 death itself. From the time when his eyes had first met hers, 
 she had had complete and undisputed mastery over his life ; she 
 had dominated his fancy, filled his imagination, ruled over his 
 destiny, and held empire over his senses. More than once she 
 had told herself, as she had told him, that in the common course 
 of human life and human nature this would change and cease 
 some day, but in her own heart she had never realised what her 
 lips had said. 
 
 Men had seldom changed to her. They had met tragic ends 
 for her sake or through her name, or they had given up their 
 lives to celibate indifference to all other women, as Gui de 
 Be'thune had done ; but they had seldom or never, having once 
 loved her, loved others ; seldom or never learned to meet her 
 tranquilly in the world as one who had become naught to them. 
 The philtre poured out by her cool white hand had been of that 
 rare flavour which makes all other beverages tasteless. Even 
 Platon Napi'axine, although her husband, had yet retained for 
 her such utter devotion in his slow, rude, mute nature, that he 
 had hungered for a rose from her bosom the night before he had 
 gone out to be shot like a dog for ht-r sake. 
 
 Of the mortification of waning ardour, of the slow sad change 
 from fervour to apathy, of the great debacle of all passion Avhich 
 so many women watch with hopeless and sinking hearts, as poor 
 peasants of Alpine valleys watch the melting snow and stealing 
 floods sweep away their homesteads — of these she had known 
 nothing ; known no more than the reigning and honoured 
 sovereign knows of exile and dethronement. Now she was 
 conscious of it, of the lir.st slight imperceptible dullness of feel- 
 ing, even as she had been conscious of what no other eyes than 
 hers saw - the first faint change in her own beauty like the film 
 of breath on a mirror. It was very slight, rather negative than 
 positive, rather told by what was lacking than by what was 
 present ; a shadow of fatigue, an absence of eagerness, a forced 
 attention, an accent of constraint , slender, vague, intangible 
 things all ; yet apparent and eloquent to her quick intelligence, 
 to her supreme knowledge of human nature.
 
 OTHMAR. lyi 
 
 They affected her with a strange sense of offence, of astonish- 
 ment, of irritation. She had a sudden impression of loss, as of 
 one who, having carelessly swung in his hand, without remem- 
 bering it, a jewel of value, discovers with a shock of surprise tliat 
 his Iiand is empty, and his treasure dropped in some ci'owded 
 street, its fall unheard, its loss only told by its absence. 
 
 Always, hitherto, after any separation he had returned to her 
 with the impassioned enthusiasm of a lover ; the hours had been 
 long to him witliout her near presence, and all the warmth of 
 early passion had accompanied his return to or his welcome of 
 her. Slie had often chilled him, checked him, laughed at him, 
 left him vexed, dissatisfied, and chafing, but the ardour on his 
 side had never Jaeen less. Men had called him uxorious, and he 
 had been careless of their ridicule ; he had only lived for her. 
 Now, for the first time, a chill had come, as sometimes in a 
 summer night, in those still grass plains of Russia, there would 
 steal through the hot, fragrant air a breath of ice-cold wind, 
 and then those skilled to read the forecast of the weather would 
 say to one anotlier : ' Lo ! the frost is near.' 
 
 She was as skilled in the weather of the human heart as the 
 peasants were in that of the earth and skies ; and she failed not 
 to read its presage aright. With all her arrogance she hud 
 always had that kind of humility which comes from great in- 
 telligence and self-comprehension ; part of her contempt for her 
 many lovers had arisen from her candid estimate of herself, as 
 not worth so much covetousness, despair, and dispute. All the 
 flatteries she had been saturated with all her life had left her 
 brain cool, and had never warped her estimate of herself. She 
 would see coldness take the place of idolatry with the same 
 philosoijhic consciousness of its inevitability with which she 
 contemplated the certainty of age overtaking her upon the road 
 of life if she continued to live. Long before their approach she 
 liad reasoned out the surety of the arrival of both, sure as the 
 surety of winter to the Russian plains. But still, nature shrinks 
 and withers before winter. "Who can welcome it as they wel- 
 come summer ? 
 
 With the inherent instinct of contradiction common to all 
 human nature she, who had nine times out of ten evaded his 
 caresses and repulsed his affections, was angered and felt 
 defrauded of her own because for once her power over him in 
 a measure failed in the exercise of its magnetism. To find 
 thoughts which occupied his mind to her exclusion was some- 
 thing so strange, so new, that it disturbed all her philosophic 
 serenity, and with that quick divination of the motives of men 
 with which her experience and her penetration supplied her, 
 she wondered if it were in truth only the memory of that poor 
 dead woman which had changed his manner and chilled his 
 presses, or if it were some fresh and living influence \
 
 234 OTHMAR. 
 
 A certain cold contempt succeeded her anger as this possi- 
 bility suggested itself. 
 
 If he were like other men, after all? Well — why noti 
 Would she care greatly % She did not know. All she was 
 conscious of at the moment was that sense of astonishment, of 
 allront, of loss, with which a woman feels for the tirst time that 
 her power over any man has had its fullest sway, and has begun 
 to decline and waste. 
 
 It was a sensation she had never experienced before, and it 
 displeased her that she should be capable of feeling it. 
 
 ' As if I were Jeannette and he were Jeanot ! ' she thought 
 with disdain for so bourgeois an emotion. 
 
 But it recalled to hei sharply, painfully, what the world 
 never had recalled to hei hitherto ; that the time must come to 
 lier, no less than to others, when her empire over all men would 
 cease, when its sceptre would pass to other hands. It is a 
 knowledge which hurts with the humiliation of dethronement 
 every woman who has ever reigned. 
 
 There was nothing said by either which had the least actual 
 coldness or offence in it : yet the sense of offence and cold- 
 ness was between them, and many times he smarted under 
 some such touch of ridicule or of reproof from her as had used 
 to make Platon !Napraxine stand like a chidden schoolboy before 
 her. He was neithei so blunt of nerve nor so dull of com- 
 prehension as Napraxine had been ; and he had an impatient 
 revolt of compromised dignity when he became the target for 
 his wife's delicate and cruel ironies. True, he knew they were 
 a part oi her temper ; as natural to her as its talon to the 
 falcon, as its pungent odour to the calycanthus. He did not 
 attribute toe serious a meaning to them, knowing that her lips 
 were often merciless when her heart was kind. Yet they irri- 
 tated and estranged him. No man likes to feel that his charac- 
 ter is lessened cr his opinions regarded with indifference by the 
 woman before whom he most desires to stand in a fair if not an 
 heroic light. 
 
 ' My "dear Otho,' she said a little irritably one day when he 
 had answered her with wandering attention, ' you are very 
 pensive and distrait since you came to Russia. What have you 
 been doing in the solitudes of a Parisian summer ? You look 
 as if ycu had been writing an epic and had failed in it.' 
 
 'Death is never gay or agreeable,' said Othmar ; 'and I 
 have been in its company.' 
 
 ' My dear, when death does not come until our friends aro 
 cvei eighty, surely wo can see liis approach without surprise 
 or any very great regret. J>csitlos, 1 never knew that Baron 
 Fricderich was remarkably symi)athctic to you. You used to 
 quarrel with him about most things. But you have such a 
 curious waywardness in always regretting, when they are dead.
 
 OTHMAR. 235 
 
 the absence of the very persons you most wished away from you 
 when they were living.' 
 
 Othmar shrank a little from the words, as though they hurt 
 him physically. They were true enougli to be painful. 
 
 ' Perhaps one knows their value too late,' he said, control- 
 ling Avitli effort a strong impatience of her want of sympathy 
 and her unkind and careless amusement at his expense. 
 
 ' Or perhaps we imagine a value in them they never pos- 
 sessed,' she replied. ' That is far more probable. Distance 
 lends enchantment to the view of them — at least it does with 
 such temperaments as yours, which are alwaj's self-tormenting 
 and given to idealising both things and people. When the 
 persons are living, to raffle and weary and contradict you, you 
 only think what bores they are ; but when they are dead you 
 begin to idealise them, and sacrifice yourself to their manes in 
 all kinds of self-censure. It is a veiy morbid way of taking life. 
 1 hope your son will not resemble you in that particular.' 
 
 ' It is to be hoped, for his comfort, that he will rather re- 
 semble his mother in the art of immediate and complete oblivion 
 of both the dead and the living,' said Othmar, Avith an irritation 
 which was almost ill-temper, and a retort which passed the 
 limits of courtesy. 
 
 He had never felt so strong an annoyance as he felt now at 
 her ironical and slighting treatment of his thoughts and feel- 
 ings ; so great an impatience of that tranquil and contemptuous 
 method of regarding life which never varied in her, and which 
 would never vary, it seemed to hiai, even before his own dead 
 body. Before it he felt that fatigue which human eyes feel 
 when long in the radiance of electric light. He longed for 
 simple sympathy, simple consolation, simple affection, as the 
 tired eyes long for rest in cool shadows of dusky dewy eves in 
 summer woods, and he was ill at ease with himself for what he 
 concealed from her. 
 
 Yet, he tlnjught, of what use would it be to tell her of that 
 poor child at Les Hameaux l She would have no pity certainly, 
 probably no patience, with what would seem to her the most 
 absurdly romantic course of adventures. She would ridicule 
 him as she ridiculed him now — if she believed him ; and very 
 likely she Avould not even do that. 
 
 She looked at him under the languid lids of her dreamy 
 eyes : eyes so calm, so indilierent, so mysterious, so satirical in 
 their survey of him as of all mankind. 
 
 ' My dear friend,' she said, with a little contempt and a 
 little rebuke in her tone, ' it seems to me that we are very 
 nearly — quarrelling ! Nothing is so vulgar as to quarrel. I 
 have never done it in my life. It is a great waste of time ; and 
 nothing can be more huargeois. I have never understood why 
 people should quarrel ; it is so very easy to walk away ! '
 
 236 OTHMAR. 
 
 Therewith she rose and walked towai-ds the open doors, with 
 that undulating movement of the hips and beautiful ease and 
 grace of step for which she was renowned through Europe ; no 
 woman's walk was comparable to hers. 
 
 Othmar remained standing where he was, and looked after 
 her with a sombre and regretful glance, in which some of the 
 old worship and passion lingered, united to a new-born anger 
 and oti'ence. The mortification which lies for any man of inteh 
 ligence and feeling in the sense that he has never really touched 
 and held the soul of the woman of whose physical possession he 
 has been master, was upon hiui in a strong and cruel sense of 
 moral failure and of intellectual impotence. Was it his fault or 
 hers ? Was it true, as he had said once to her, that you cannot 
 obtain more from any nature than it possesses, and that all the 
 forces of created life cannot draw fire from the smooth marble 
 or make the pale pearl blush like the o^Dal? Was it that she 
 had it not in her to give any man more than that mingling of 
 momentary aphrodisiacal indulgence and of eternal immutable 
 derision ; and that whilst her power to create a heaven of physi- 
 cal passion was so great, her power of satisfying the exactions of 
 the heart and soul was slight ? 
 
 Or was it, as the self-depreciation of his temperament led 
 him to think, that he him/jlf had not moral and mental force 
 or intellectual greatness strong enough to obtain empii'e over 
 her mind — a mind so cultured, so refined, so exacting, so sati- 
 ated, that hardly any human companionship could succeed in 
 awaking in it any lasting interest 1 
 
 He had humility enough to believe the last. 
 
 The Piincess Lobow Gregorievna, sitting mute and chill as 
 a statue of Nemesis, heard and watched, and in the depths of 
 her narrow darksome soul, filled with harsh creeds and as harsh 
 hatreds, said to herself that perchance, after all, her dead sou 
 might yet be avenged by the mere results of time — that foe of 
 love, that friend of all disunion. 
 
 Their marriage had been abhorrent to her. It had seemed to 
 her eyes like a blow on the cheek given to her son's corpse. 
 Any laugh or smile of either of them seemed an aSront to him. 
 Every glance of sympathy exchanged between them seemed a 
 mockery of his death, sutlercd for their sakes. She who had 
 never doubted that Otlimar had betrayed her son in his life- 
 time, only cherished one hope in her chill breast— to see him 
 suffer the same fate. She had always felt that she would kiss 
 on both cheeks any lover of Nadine's who should make Othmar 
 feel the shame of a dishonoured name, the pangs of a betrayed 
 trust. But for that lover she had looked in vain. She had 
 always said to the hungry hate in her lieart : ' Patience ; time 
 will bring all things ; and the serjient may cast its skin but 
 keeps its nature.'
 
 OTHMAR. 237 
 
 But of late years slie had feared that nothing would ever 
 divide them. 
 
 Their lives seemed to her to pass on Uke a smooth full river, 
 without shoal or rapid, or any spate from storm. There was 
 many an hour when she lay stretched in semblance of devoutest 
 prayer before the holy eikon of the chamber altar, when all that 
 her soul uttered and her lips murmured were curses low and 
 lonof upon them both. 
 
 Year after year went on and brought her no gratification of 
 lier desires and her hate. All things went well with them. 
 They had health and pleasure ; happiness too, so far as happi- 
 ness comes to mortals. Their oflspring throve in loveliness and 
 grace, and the world honoured and caressed them both. Some- 
 times, in the stern yet frantic hatred which she cherished, she 
 would pray that disease or pestilence might at least take the 
 woman's beauty from her ; but her prayer passed ungranted. 
 Nadine had ever that serene immunity from all serious maladies 
 of the flesh which so often accompanies the fragile appearance 
 and sensitive nerves of women who, like her, declare themselves 
 made unwell by a discordant noise, an unpleasant odour, a 
 Avearisome day, or any other trifle which displeases them. Even 
 the pains and perils of maternity her good fortune had made 
 unusually light to her, and except from that cause she had hardly 
 had a day's real suflering in her whole existence. To the sullen 
 eyes of Napraxine's mother she always seemed to bear a charmed 
 life. 
 
 Therefore with fierce dumb joy Lobow Gregorievna, with 
 her vigilant ear and eye, saw the one little rift within the lute, 
 heard the one jarring chord on the music. It was so slight that 
 no anxiety less keen than her own would have detected it ; but 
 it was there. 
 
 He remained in Russia a fortnight, but during that time he 
 did not find any occasion which seemed to him propitious enough 
 for him to speak of Damaris, with any chance of obtaining sym- 
 ])athy for her position or understanding of his own actions. 
 With that ignorance of what most concerns us, which is one of 
 the saddest things of life, he never dreamed that any change in 
 himself had made his wife as he found her to be, in one of her 
 most captious, most capricious, most unsympathetic moods. He 
 was not unused to these ; he attributed them now to the weai-i- 
 ness she felt at existence in the plains of Ural and impatience at 
 the companionship of the Princess Napraxine which he knew 
 was at all times irksome to her. He was not aware that he was 
 himself more absent of mind, less tender in manner, less frankly 
 and fully confidential in speech ; he was not aware that this one 
 thing untold, this one thought unrevealed, had caused an alter- 
 ation in him, slight and vague indeed, yet plainly perceptible to 
 her, skilled reader of manner and of mind as she was.
 
 23S OTHMAR. 
 
 A delicate nature shrinks from the imputation of unworthy 
 motives, and a fastidious temper shrinks from any possibility of 
 ridicule ; it was the dread of both which kept him silent as to 
 the friendship he had shown to the child from Bonaventurc. 
 Tlie apprehension of his wife's scepticism and ironies hung like 
 a grey mist over the generous impulses of his manhood, as in 
 his earliest youth the certainty of his father's brutal cynicism 
 had lain like a stone on the poetic aspirations of his boyhood. 
 
 Even in those rare instants when she was moved to sympathy 
 with any unselfishness or any unworldliness, there was always in 
 her eyes some faint gleam of derision, there was always in her 
 voice some lingering accent of doubt and of raillery. She woidd 
 iiave been capable of many great things in great emergencies 
 hcrtelf, but she would have been wholly incapable of refraining 
 from making a jest of them afterwards. It is the temper of jill 
 wit ; it is tlie temper of much philosophy ; but it is not the 
 temper which invites the confidence or soothes the doubts of 
 another. 
 
 Confidence, like a swallow coming over seas in the storm and 
 sunshine of spring weather, will only nest where it is sure of a 
 safe shelter. 
 
 The higher, better, subtler emotions of the human heart will 
 not venture to come forth into the wintry air of mockery or 
 scorn ; they are shy blossoms which want the warm wind of a 
 sure sympathy to enable them to expand. 
 
 ' If I told her, she would only think me either an imbecile 
 or a libertine/ he thought, and the tale went untold. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 Amyot was still quite solitary when he returned from Russia. 
 The children were on the north coast by the sea ; its chatelaine 
 was still taking her desired presence with rare condescension 
 and alternative moods of ennui and irony to those royal huntinf 
 ca,stles and imperial pleasure places she deigned to honour ; the 
 wide avenues, the great teriaces, the blossoming gardens, the 
 sunlit colonnades of the modern summer dining-hall were only 
 tenanted by the last lingering butterflies which skimmed the air 
 with white wings, blue wings, scarlet wings, and the balmy 
 aromatic scent of the millions of roses which seemed to wander 
 through the empty places like a visible presence. 
 
 Usually whenever he came thither he was surrounded by tliat 
 society which was a necessity to his wife, even whilst it failed to 
 .satisfy her, by that movement, gaiety, and odraiH, which even 
 if they fail to amuse, yet can always in a manner distract thought 
 and fill up time. There seemed to him a strange silence, a
 
 OTHMAR. 239 
 
 melancholy which was oppressive, in these stately places, usually 
 so full of colour and pleasure, now so quiet and so lonely, with 
 only some noiseless servant passing with swift step across its 
 floors or down its staircases. 
 
 There was not even the song of a bird to break the stillness ; 
 it Avas early in autumn, and their sweet throats were mute. 
 
 He saw in remembrance the grace of his wife's movements 
 as she had passed down these great stairs, he saw the smile in 
 her eyes indulgent as to a child's weakness, ironical as of a man's 
 folly ; he heard her voice saying, with that little sound in it of 
 some exquisite disdain falling from on high on mortal thoughts 
 as silvery fountain-water falls from marble lieights on creeping 
 mosses : 
 
 ' It is scarcely worth while to fair& des madrijaux. ' 
 
 Had that speaker ever loved him even for five minutes of hgr 
 life 1 
 
 Had she ever known what love Avas ? Ha thought of tha 
 Court of Love which she had held under those oak trees yonder, 
 above whose rounded masses a white moon now sailed. With 
 what ingenuity, what subtlety, what philosophy, what absolute 
 knowledge of all love's minutest weaknesses and utmost mad- 
 ness, she had been able to discourse of it. But was it not such 
 knowledge as the physiologist's knowledge of pain in the creature 
 on which he experiments l Of knowledge there is abundance, 
 of the chill and analytical knowledge of science, of the name and 
 structure of every torn tissue, of every bleeding fibre, of every 
 tortured nerve ; but knowledge such as is born of fellow feelin 
 ot sensitive sympathy, of comprehending p)ity, there is none 
 Was it not so with her 'I 
 
 Had not love been always to her as the living organisation 
 which he tortures is to the physiologist ? Had she not, like him, 
 watched, studied, tabulated the agonies of the wretched creature 
 before her, whilst also, like him, she had never felt in her own 
 nerves one single thrill of pain 1 
 
 As her lover it had allured him with the intense attraction 
 of an impenetrable mystery, this attitude of her mind, this in- 
 difference, both sensual and spiritual, before the demands of 
 love. But as the companion of her life it left him with a sense 
 of dissatisfaction, and of unsatisfied desire. For years it had 
 served to excite and to sustain his passion, but as time wore on 
 it almost communicated its coldness to himself ; he began to 
 feel with a sense of terror, as before some disloyalty which he 
 could not escape, that the apathy, the fatigue, the absence of 
 emotion, which are the certain attendants on all satisfied 
 passion, were not far distant from himself. 
 
 The very air of Amyot seemed melancholy to him in these 
 late summer heats, without the usual gaiety and movement 
 which were there at most other seasons when ha came to it. 
 
 &5
 
 240 OTHMAR. 
 
 Solitutle had always, in his youth, been welcome to him, and had 
 fatigued him less than the routine of society ; but solitude 
 requii-es the charm of accompanying dreams, it needs the visions 
 of youth, the vague but glorious hopes of opening life ; and 
 Othmar had a vague sense tliat he would never dream anymore, 
 that he grew old, that liis fate was fixed, that never would any 
 very welcome or sweet response come to his wishes from the 
 voices of the future. He had had the poet's temperament with- 
 out the poet's power of expression ; he could not take the poet's 
 consolation, ' Sing to the Muses, and let the world go by.' His 
 destiny imprisoned him, and there was little sympathy between 
 himself and it. 
 
 As he walked in the moonlight, under the roofs of late roses 
 which shed their petals, white, crimson, and blush-coloured, on 
 hina, dewy cool and sweet as the touch of his wife's cheek, a 
 servant brought him a pencilled note. 
 
 It said briefly : 
 
 ' There has been an accident. We are not hurt, but the train 
 c.innot take us on. Send your carriages for us. I saw in the 
 journals this morning that you were at Amyot.' 
 
 The paper had been sent from the town of Beaugency, whilst 
 it was signed ' Blanche de Laon : ' the last person on earth Avhose 
 presence he would have wished for in his solitude. Irritating, 
 distasteful, and even painful to him as her society was, yet he 
 could do no less than attend to such a request. He must have 
 complied with it had it come from a stranger. He at once sent 
 his brake and two other carriages, with fast horses, to do her 
 bidding, and returned indoors to give such orders as were need- 
 ful for this unexpected invasion of an unknown number of 
 guests. 
 
 It was late, and he himself had dined two hours before ; but he 
 ordered a supper to be got ready for the new comers, who might 
 not liave dined at Oi'leans. He concluded that she was passing 
 from Palis to one of lier chateaux near Saumur, where in late 
 summer and early autumn she often assembled the very dis- 
 tinguished, but somewhat noisy, society which regarded her as 
 its queen. His musings and his solitude liad been roughly dis- 
 IiuUcd ; and, tliough botlihad been somewhat joyless, he regretted 
 them as an hour later he heard the roH of the returning wheels 
 and the stamping of impatient horses' hoofs in the great central 
 court of honour, and went perforce to meet and greet his unin- 
 vited guests. 
 
 The Princess Blanche, having herself driven the four horses 
 of the brake through tlie moonlit cross-roads which led from 
 ]>eaugency to Amyot, wai in the highest si:)irits as she descended 
 from the box seat, and gaily greeted him in her shrill, swift 
 voice and her fashionable lan^jue vcrtc There had been a severe 
 accident ; a goods train liad been met by the express ; the usual
 
 OTIJMAR. 241 
 
 story, as she said contemptuously. The line was strewn with 
 •v-recked waggons and overturned engines ; there had been no 
 posiibility of proceeding to Blois. Had there been people killed ? 
 Oh, yes ; she believed so. ' On hraUlait la-has, li'cst-ce ixis, 
 Gontran ? ' she said indifferently to one of her companions, and 
 added, with fervour, '■ Tiens ! J'ai iinc faim de lonj) ! ' 
 
 * But you said that no one was hurti ' said Othmar, regretting 
 tl at he had not gone in person to the scene of trouble. 
 
 ' None of us were,' she replied. ' We were in the centre of 
 the train. We felt the shock ; that was all. We were playing 
 the American "poker." The collision threw down the cards. I 
 should have come to Amyot if you had not been here. No one 
 could pass the night at a country station. Besides, Amyot is 
 always ready for a hundred people.' 
 
 •■ Amyot is always at the service of all my friends,' replied 
 Othiuar with sincerity, but with a certain stiffness. He disliked 
 her familiarity with him at all times, and was conscious that, 
 despite it, she bore no good will to himself or to his wife. 
 
 She wasted no more words on him, but led the way into Ihe 
 house, scarcely deigning to present to him those of her compan- 
 ions with whom he Avas not already acquainted. There was 
 some dozen of them, all, both men and women, notabilities of 
 that haute gomme which was the only world she recognised. 
 They had been travelling with her from Paris, being bidden for 
 a shouting party to her castle in Touraine. 
 
 Othmar conducted her to the great hall ; then he said to 
 her : 
 
 ' Everything is at your disposition, and all the household at 
 your command. You will excuse me if myself I leave you for 
 awhile to go and see if I can be of any use to those less happily 
 fated persons — qui hraillaicnt Id-basJ 
 
 She laughed. 
 
 ' Ah ! you were always a Don Quixote. Even Madame 
 Nadege has not cured you.' 
 
 ' Your servants may have been hurt, or worse still, your 
 /o7(r^o«s damaged. I will bring you news of them,' said Othmar, 
 with an irony which affronted whilst it amused her. 
 
 She went to her own apartments poiLV se debarbouillcr ; and 
 a little later, surrounded by her fellow-travellers, sat down to 
 supper in the summer dining-hall, which shed its dazzling light 
 far oiit on to the dusky lawns and the pale aisle of the white 
 roses ; there was a banquet fit for the gods, though prepared at 
 such short notice ; the delicate wines circulated quickly ; the 
 adventure was amusing ; the whole thing unexpected. Blanche 
 de Laon and all her comj^anions were in the highest spirits, in a 
 more vulgar world they might even have been thought a little 
 intoxicated ; their laughter rang frequent and shrill and long 
 9ver the quiet gardens and the royal woods. 
 
 &
 
 242 OTHMAR. 
 
 Meanwhile their host went to the scene of the late disaster, 
 and found a sight of frightful destruction and of many deaths, 
 v/hile scores of poor iKH'ned cattle, mutilated and moaning, 
 lay in pitiful heaps of bruised and bleeding misery upon the 
 iron way. 
 
 It was noon in the following day when he retui'ned to 
 Aniyot, where all his unbidden guests were slumbering soundly 
 and late after their alarm and their fatigues. 
 
 He, tired oiit himself, went to his own rooms and rested as 
 well as he could rest for the sights and sounds of suflering which 
 haunted him in his sleep. He had done what he could to alle- 
 viate it ; but that all seemed so little and so inefficacious. At 
 sunset he met all his undesired visitors at dinner. 
 
 ' Your wife is still in Russia ? ' asked Blanchette that 
 evening. 
 
 Othmar assented. 
 
 ' Does it amuse her, Russia ? If it did not, however, she 
 would not stay there.' 
 
 ' It is her country, and her court.' 
 
 ' Of coui'se. But that Avould not make her stay there if she 
 were bored. Why did not you stay too % ' 
 
 ' I had business in France ; the death of my uncle has 
 doubled my obligations and occupations.' 
 
 ' And some of your business lies at Chevreuse ? ' 
 * At Che^Teuse % ' 
 
 He was astonished and was annoyed to feel himself also em- 
 barrassed. The blue cold eyes of Blanche de Laon were looking 
 at him with their penetrating supercilious malice over the 
 feathers of her great fan. 
 
 She smiled, amused and unmerciful. 
 
 ' Did Baron Fritz leave you that legacy at Chevreuse % It is 
 a very handsome one ! ' 
 
 ' I do not understand to what you allude,' said Othmar, with 
 coldness and irritation. 
 
 She laughed ; a little short incredulous laugh. 
 ' My cousin ! If you do not want peojile to talk about it, 
 why do you stand in the middle of a liay-field with your uncle's 
 legacy ? — if it be your uncle's.' 
 
 Othmar was irritated and more embarrassed than he showed. 
 Blanchette was the last person on earth whom he would have 
 chosen to know anything of the more intimate details of his life. 
 He knew her unsparing tongue, the exaggerated colour she 
 could give to the slightest story, the smallest incident ; the 
 malicious pleasure in mischief-making and in scandal which she 
 took at all times from mere natural malice and love of caustic 
 words. Whatever she saw, or knew, or guessed, she dressed up 
 in colours of her own invention, and made into comedies, to 
 divert herself and her world. Was it possible that she had
 
 OTHMAR. 243 
 
 recognised Daniaris ? He thought not. ]\Iany nionths had gone 
 by since the evening at iSt. Pharamond, and it was scarcely 
 probable that so great a lady, with her multiform interests, 
 excitement, and intrigues, had ever remembered the peasant 
 girl of Bonaventure. 
 
 He was silent because he was for the moment too amazed 
 to trust himself to speak, and Blanchette gazed at him over 
 her fan, with cruel satisfaction and entertainment at his visible 
 irritation. 
 
 ' The open air is always so dangerous,' she said, maliciouslj'. 
 ' Even if you be sure there is nobody near, how can you be sure 
 there is not a balloon somewhere above you ? or a field-glass 
 half a mile off? I had a field-glass ; I was driving from Ver- 
 sailles. If the Baron left you many legacies like that one, 
 your affaii's must be more agreeable than legal successions often 
 are.' 
 
 Tlien she laughed again, and rose and took her elegant per- 
 son, her shrill, cruel, little laugh, her j^ale, keen, penetrating 
 eyes into an adjoining room, where she gathered her adorers 
 about her to play at c\wm in de fer, and win or lose, in breathless 
 alternations, gold enough to dower fifty dowerless maidens, or 
 stock a score of farms, whilst without the still, cool, dewy night 
 lay soft as a blessing on the gardens and the woods and the great 
 distant river, with the shadowy vessels gliding to and fro, and 
 the little villages, dusky and noiseless, hidden away under the 
 vineyards and the pear trees. 
 
 She cared in nothing what he did ; he was profoundly indif- 
 ferent to her when she did not remember her dead cousin, and 
 then she hated him. She had not seen the features of his com- 
 panion in the fields of Les Hameaus, nor would she have 
 recognised them had she done so. The evening at St. Pharamond 
 was blotted and blurred into oblivion under the heaps of for- 
 gotten things of a past year which could have no place in a mind 
 engrossed in its own vanities and excitations, and living wholly 
 in the present. But she had recognised Othinar himself as her 
 carriage had passed yards off, and she had put up her field-glass 
 at the towers of the chateau of Dampierre ; and it had amused 
 her to find that he was just like other men, though he afi'ected 
 such absurd, undivided devotion to one. 
 
 No doubt it was only an amonrette ; but it pleased her to 
 have something with which she could tease him when she felt so 
 disposed ; and it pleased her more strongly still to reflect that 
 his wife was losing her power over him, which she probably 
 was, she reasoned, if another woman were gaining any. Pure 
 malice was an integral part of her nature ; to irritate, torment, 
 and dominate people through their various little secrets seemed 
 to her the best part of the comedy of life. She had nothing of 
 the supreme indolent disdain of the woman she hated, or of her 
 
 b2
 
 -44 OTHaMAR. 
 
 absolute indiflerence. She loved to jourrcr son nez in all holes 
 and comers. Her theory was that all knowlod<(e was useful, 
 especially when it was knowledge to your friends' detriment ; 
 and a lively and insatiable curiosity was her strongest guarantee 
 against ennui. 
 
 She thought complacently of the trouble she had cast into 
 his mind as she sat and played her game of hazard, the light 
 flashing on her rings and the gold she handled. Ko doubt the 
 tiling was only an amour en village, an absurdity, a caprice, some 
 rosy-limbed, coarsely-built nymph of La Beauce, who pleased 
 hnn for the hour because of her utter unlikeness to the great 
 ladies he lived amongst. 
 
 ' Je les connais!' thought Blanchette, with something of 
 Xadine's contempt for the sex. ' When they can drink out of a 
 hundred silver goblets they are always crazy for a brown cottage 
 pipkin. They are always like that.' 
 
 She attached no importance to the discovery that he walked 
 not unaccompanied in the fields of the vale of Chevreuse ; but 
 the knowledge that he did so had embarrassed him ; that was 
 enough to make it delightful to her. 
 
 ^It amused her to be at Amyot Avhen its mistress was absent. 
 ' Nous sornmes ires Hen installes,' she said carelessly to Otlimar, 
 not even going through the form of inquiring as to his wishes, 
 and she and her party stayed on for the rest of the week. He 
 was displeased, but he could not tell them to go. His wife 
 could do that sort of thing ; he could not. It seemed to him 
 impossible to make even self-invited guests realise that they 
 were not welcome. Blanche de Laon thought his compliance 
 argued fear of her, and was more diverted than before. 
 
 ' Perhaps he is dying to get back to Chevreuse ! ' she thought 
 with much amusement. ' But he is too courteous to turn us 
 out ; he belongs to the last century .' 
 
 She was not grateful for his courtesy ; she, rather, despised 
 him for it. 
 
 One morning she took a fancy to wander over the house by 
 herself ; it was an immense building, and to visit it thoroughly 
 would have taken more hours than she gave it minutes ;°but 
 even in her rapid and cursory fashion, she covered a good deal 
 of ground. 
 
 'It is really a royal place,' she thought. ' We have nothing 
 like it. La Finance gets everything.' 
 
 She disliked Othmar ; he was everything that she detested 
 in man : he was reserved, punctilious, prejudiced ; he had a 
 distant manner of cold courtesy, which was not at all of her own 
 generation ; he was grave, often preoccupied, and always blind 
 to her own attractions : yet as she went over she wished that 
 she had married him.
 
 or H MAR. 245 
 
 ^ Quel (UahJe de vie je Ini avrais donnc ! ' she thought with 
 com])lacency, and how amusing it woukl have been ! 
 
 Bertrand de Laon was not rich ; at least not rich enough for 
 ihs enormous expenditure at Avliich they lived ; and then he 
 was so stupid, so amiable, so devoted, that there was no kind of 
 pleasure in doing him every sort of wrong that a woman can do 
 a man ! He never knew anything about it, or, if he did know, 
 never resented anything. She grew tired of kicking this poor 
 spaniel, who, beat him as she would, always came humbly and 
 caressingly to her feet. 
 
 As she wandered about the house she came on the doors 
 which led to the apai^tments of Yseulte. They Avere locked. 
 She sent one of her companions to fetch the major-domo. 
 
 ' Open these doors,' she said imperiously to the official, who 
 timidly answered that he dared not ; except by his master's 
 orders they could never be unlocked. ' I have his orders, open 
 them,' said Blanchette, with such authority in her tone that the 
 man never dreamed she was not speaking the truth ; besides it 
 seemed to him to be natural enough ; she had Vjeen, he knew, 
 the cousin german of the dead Countess Othmar. He fetched 
 the duplicate keys he possessed, and opened the doors : great 
 doors of cedar-wood like all those at Amyot, with intricate locks 
 of old Florentine work of steel and silver. Then he went in 
 and opened also some of the shutters of the apartments, letting 
 in the warm summer light from without on some portions of the 
 rooms, whilst other parts of them were left in darkness. 
 
 Blanchette shut out her companions with her usual uncere- 
 monious manner. 
 
 ' It is not for you,' she said curtly, and banged the doors in 
 their faces with that insolence which was considered by others 
 as by herself dhin chic supreme. 
 
 She had never been able to come there before, for she had 
 never before been at Amyot in the absence of its mistress. She 
 was not sure why she came now ; partly because she thought it 
 would annoy Othmar, partly from a movement of that remem- 
 bered affection for the companion of her childhood, which was 
 the only thing of any tenderness which had ever sprung up in 
 the breast of Blanchette : one tiny flower of sentiment blossom- 
 ing on a granite soil. The sentiment had been rooted in selfish- 
 ness ; ' she used to give me so many things ! ' she thought always, 
 whenever she remembered her. 
 
 The little volume of manuscript poems was in its place ; 
 Othmar had hesitated to remove it ; everything was in the rooms 
 as when Yseulte had lived, and no eyes but his own had ever 
 beheld them. He had returned more than once to read again 
 those poor fragments, so simple in language, so immeasurable 
 in devotion : read them with a mist before his sight and the 
 sense of some base ingratitude in himself which had come to luu)
 
 246 OTHMAR. 
 
 on his first discovery of tliein. He had always replaced them 
 with a lingering and reverent touch in the drawer, whence he 
 had first taken them, where they lay now with a crumpled glove, 
 two or three faded roses, and some notepaper with her initials 
 in silver on it. The restless penetrating agile glance and fingers 
 of Blanchette, touching, seeing, alighting on all things, and 
 skimming over each with the lightness of swallows, brought her 
 to that drawer amongst other places, and showed her the little 
 volume lying with the dead roses. She took it up, and turned 
 over the pages rapidly ; looking on it here, there, everywhere ; 
 scanning a hundred lines in the space of time that would have 
 served to others to see only half a score. The familiar hand- 
 wi'iting, the pathetic words, the mixture of ignorance and of 
 intensity, the force of strong emotions striving to express them- 
 selves in an unwonted manner, and half observed, half revealed 
 by the unaccustomed livery of language, had a certain efiect 
 upon her as she stood in the empty rooms before one of tbe 
 great casements, and turned over the leaves of the little book, 
 half contemptuous, half reverential. 
 
 If she had read such lines in a printed volume, she would 
 have tossed it away with her most terrible sneer. ' Pleurni- 
 cheuse ! ' she would have said, with a grin of her white small teeth ; 
 but read in the handwriting of her dead cousin, they aflected 
 her differently ; they did not seem ridiculous ; they brought 
 home to her the fact that this world, which was but a masked 
 ball, a mad/eie, a continual comedy to herself, might be to 
 others, who yet were not wholly fools, a place of martyrdom, 
 endured in silence. Her shrewd and quick intelligence supply- 
 ing the place of sympathy, could read between the lines ; could 
 make her understand as Othmar had understood, all that was 
 unuttered, or only half uttered, in those halting, timid, tender, 
 wistful verses. 
 
 ' Dame I Comme c'est drole ! ' she murmured to herself : it 
 was droll that anyone with youth, with fortune, with beauty, 
 with all the pleasures, and pastime, and pomps of existence at 
 her call, should have wasted her time and her tears in useless 
 lament, because the heart of one man was cold to her. It was 
 droll ; it was absurd ; it was contemptible ; and yet she closed 
 the little velvet book, and laid it down by the worn glove, 
 and the dead roses with a vague admiration, with a certain 
 respect. 
 
 But her heart grew harder than before against the man who 
 had been thus loved, and had given no throb of love in answer. 
 
 She remembered the words of Freiderich Othmar at the 
 mausoleum in the grounds yonder : ' She would wish you to 
 spare him.' Yes, no doubt, poor, generous, heroic, saintly, 
 foolish soul ! — if she could know, if she could speak, if slic could 
 intcrjjose, she would always come from her grave to save or to
 
 OTHMAR. 247 
 
 serve the husband wha had never had one impulse of love for 
 her. But the dead know nothing ; tlie dead never stir ; ' qiiaiid 
 Oil est murt c'cst puur longtemps,' thought BLanchette, with grim 
 rcahsm, as she closed the drawer which hehl the little poem : 
 and meanwhile, if ever she herself had the chance, she would do 
 as she had said : she would rub the sand into the gall, she would 
 widon any woinid that she saw. 
 
 She thought to herself, 'If she had lived, perhaps ' per- 
 haps she would have kept alive some little green place in her 
 own soul ; perhaps she would have kept her own steps aloof 
 from some vices which were not all sweetness ; perhaps she 
 would have had something in her own life besides insolent 
 audacity, merciless intrigue, and insatiable curiosity of unattain- 
 able excitations : it was a consciousness of her own loss, in the 
 loss of the one purer influence which her life had ever known, 
 whicli made the arid and frivolous nature of Blanche de Laon 
 cherish her hatred for those who seemed to her as the murderers 
 of Yseulte with a ferocity and tenacity of remembrance which 
 was the only impersonal emotirm she had ever known. 
 
 Avarice, expenditure, vanity, corruption, every ingenuity of 
 self-indulgence and of physical licence, filied up her own days, 
 and left no space for any memory which was not selfish, any 
 desire which was not base ; she had copied and exaggerated the 
 egotism of Nadine Napraxine until ii had become amonstro-iity, 
 and she had replaced the physical indilierence of her model by 
 appetites and curiosities which were both morbid and insatiable. 
 Yet her life at tunes failed to satisfy her, and at such time the 
 recollection of Yseulte came to her as a cool breeze will touch 
 the hot forehead of a drunkard. Things whicli had been odious 
 and ridiculous to her in all others, had looked worth something 
 when mirrored to her in the clear soul of her childhood's com- 
 panion ; when Yseulte had passed out of her life she, little 
 greedy, callous cynic of a child though she had been, had vaguely 
 felt that something had gone away from her which would never 
 be replaced. 
 
 ' Poor little saint ! Poor little fool 1 ' she thought now, with 
 as near an approach to tenderness and reverence as her tempera- 
 ment could approach, as she cast a lingering glance over the 
 lonely rooms, with the dead flowers in the vases, the dust of 
 years on the walls, the stray sunbeams slanting on to the empty 
 bed, the scent of late roses and autumn fruits coming in through 
 the dusky shadows and close odours within. 
 
 ' Pour little saint ! Poor little fool ! ' 
 
 As she stoiKl thus, Othmar, passing through the gardens, saw 
 the Avindows open which were by his command always closed. 
 He was immediately beneath them, and he called aloud in tones 
 of exceeding anger : ' Who has ventured to enter there ? ' 
 
 Blanche de Laon heard, and her insolent, fair, small face
 
 248 OTHMAR. 
 
 looked out from one of the open places in the old painted case- 
 ments, guarded with their scrolls of iron. 
 
 'It is I,' she said, with the usual impertinence of her accent 
 hushed into quietude, almost into sadness. Then she leaned 
 her elbows on the stonework of the sill, and put her face close 
 to his. He was almost on a level with her, for those rooms 
 were raised but a metre or two from the ground. 
 
 He grew pale with indignation. 
 
 'Madame de Laon,' he said in a low tone, through which all 
 his anger thrilled, ' when I put all my house at your disposition 
 there were some things in it which I did not suppose it neces- 
 sary to enjoin you to respect.' 
 
 ' Pooh ! ' said Blanchette, resting her elbows on the stone 
 and her chin on her hands. ' I have more title in her room.s 
 than you ; I have not forgotten her. ' 
 
 His face flushed ; he hesitated a moment. 
 
 ' What means did you take to induce my servants to disobey 
 me ? ' he asked, avoiding her later words. 
 
 ' I told them I had your authority,' said Blanchette care- 
 lessly. ' What can it matter to you ? Yon never come here. 
 You never go to her grave. Your uncle did. Even I do. But 
 you — never.' 
 
 Othmar was silent. He hated this woman with her impu- 
 dent pale face, her high satirical tones, her overbearing eflron- 
 tery, and he hated to see her there in the rooms which had 
 been the bridal chambers of Yseulte in the one brief summer of 
 happiness Avhich she had known. 
 
 Blanchette looked down at him with hard cold eyes ; she, 
 on her side, hated him no less at that moment. There was no 
 one within hearing ; the western garden on which these rooms 
 looked was the loneliest though the loveliest place in Aniyot ; 
 and since the death of Yseulte it had been so unfrequented, 
 that hares would come and nibble at the moss-roses imder the 
 windows, and once a stag from the herds of red deer cast loose 
 in tlie park had dared to enter and drink his fill at the fountain. 
 
 ' Tiens!' said Blanchette, leaning from the window, her arti- 
 ficial pale blonde beauty loolcing akin there. ' Slie broke her 
 heart for you : one laughs at those things in the world ; they 
 are good for the "Traviata," not out of it ; it was absurd — 
 grotesquely absurd ; and yet in her one knows it was true. 
 When I was a child, and she married you, I wanted her to 
 think of the fine clotlies, the fine jewels, the fine houses, all the 
 rest of it — all the tilings ice give ourselves for — but slie never 
 cared. She said once, ' ' If he were a beggar I should be 
 happier, because then he would be sure that it is for himself 
 that I care." Oh yes, she would have gone barefoot in the dust 
 after you if you had held out your hand. And you — you did 
 not see it or knoAV it, or thank her for it ; all you cared for wag
 
 OTHMAR. 249 
 
 Nacline Napraxine. It is alwaj-s so. It is always the other — 
 the other that we cannot have. And now " the other" is your 
 wife ; and so you goto the meadows in Chevreuse. How like a 
 man ! And to think that such a woman as Yseulte should 
 have died for you ! Pouah ! If she had known you as I know 
 men she would not have wasted a hair of her head on you. 
 Pouah ! ' 
 
 Then she banged the casement close, and left him standing 
 there. He might rage in his heart as he chose, what did she 
 care for his wrath or for his amours or for his whole existence 1 
 What she had cared for was the dead girl who had died for him. 
 That she had insulted him in return for his hospitality and liis 
 coiu'tesy was delightful to her. In that moment she would 
 have liked to insult him before the whole world. 
 
 Othmar paused a moment, looking blankly up at this window 
 of his own house thus shut in his face ; then, with slow step, 
 and with his head down, he pursued his way through the 
 western garden. His guest had insulted him, but the worst 
 sting of the insult lay in its truth. It was true, most true ; ho 
 owned to himself that he had been wholly unworthy the sacrifice 
 of such a life as Yseulte's. 
 
 Yet, he thought, in the words which had been quoted under 
 the oaks of Amyot in the Court of Love, ' How is it under our 
 control to love or not to love ? ' 
 
 Love is not to be commanded, and naught less than a great 
 and vnidivided love could ever have given happiness and fiiith 
 in itself to so delicate, to so sensitive, to so perfectly and 
 sincerely humble a nature as that of the dead girl whose bridal 
 hours had been passed in those closed chambers, around whose 
 casements the ivy climbed and the swallows nested undisturbed 
 as the .'reasons passed. The rough, sharp, upbraiding words of 
 Blanche de I;aon smarted in his memory, as the cut of a knife 
 smarts in the flesh. They only repeated in coarse emphiisia 
 what his own conscience had said to him ever since he had found 
 the little manuscript poems in the drawer with the faded roses. 
 Before then, with the blindness of a man whose whole soul is 
 centred on another passion than the one which claims his 
 sympathy, he had never once dreamed tliat the death of Yseulte 
 had been self sought. 
 
 ^o 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 DA^rAPvTS, meanwhile, was altogether at ease as to her own cir- 
 cumstances. No doubt ever entered her mind as to the legacy 
 bequeathed by her grandfather ; it was more than enough for 
 all her wants, and she understood that she could live at Les 
 Hameaux easily, all her lifetime, if she chose. But withoit
 
 2 so OTHMAR. 
 
 any apprehension for her future, she was not without that un- 
 rest which is the inseparable companion of all ambition. The 
 I'emembrance of the wife of Othmar was like a thorn in her side : 
 she had an eager, passionate, thirsty desire to justify herself 
 in the sight of that great lady, to become something which could 
 not be derided or denied or set aside with contempt. The 
 memory of that day under the roof of St. Pharamond was con- 
 tinually with her, in all its humiliation and its disappointment, 
 and its sharp cruel sense of being a barbarian amongst the 
 highest grace and culture that were possible to hum;in life 
 and manners. It had been a glimpse into an unknown land 
 never to be forgotten ; the gates to it had been shut in her face, 
 almost as soon as opened ; but the dreams which had come to 
 her through them remained with her, and pursued her sleeping 
 and waking. 
 
 She threw herself into the resources of study Avith a kind of 
 passion. In books, she thought, lay all the secrets of the spells 
 of power. 
 
 When he had bidden her wed a farmer of La Beauce he had 
 wounded her in a way that she could not forget ; not because 
 she despised that homelier life of the husbandman, but because 
 she thought that he deemed her incapable of the higher life of 
 the intellect or the soul. She had been violently uprooted from 
 all her childish associations, and severed from all the habits, 
 thoughts, and attachments which had been hers from birth. 
 The shock of that separation had intensified and deepened the 
 sensitive side of her nature, and subdued the sanguine nisoifci- 
 ancz of it. She was not hapi)y at Les Hamcaux as she had been 
 happy on Bonaventure ; but she was still companioned by many 
 dreams, and still full of high courage, though the dreams had 
 lost something of their splendid phantasy, and the courage had 
 lost something of its rash undoubting faith. 
 
 At times she longed for her old playmate, the sea, with a 
 curious painful yearning — the yearning of the home-sickness 
 of the exile. 
 
 ' How well I can understand,' she said once to Rosselin, 
 ' that Napoleon longed all his life for the smell of the earth (.)f 
 Corsica. All my life I am sure I shall smell the smell of the 
 fresh sea water leaping up in the wind under the orange boughs 
 and the bay leaves ; there is nothing like it here, though the 
 pastures smell sweet in the dew.' 
 
 In a short time she had changed miich. She had become 
 still taller, and the peachlike bloom of her face had paled. She 
 had the look in her eyes of one who studies assidr.ously the 
 great thoughts of great writers ; she had a less childlike and 
 boylike beauty, and one more intellectual and spiritual. Months 
 count as years at her age, and the southern blood of the Borardes 
 matured early.
 
 OTHMAR. 251 
 
 Hosselin watched her growth with pride. Her softened 
 accent, her subdued gesture, her intelligent comprehension of 
 intellectual things, her simple but picturesque clothing, were all 
 due to his training or his suggestion. He had taken her to great 
 libraries, famous galleries, historic palaces, and had taught her 
 to luiderstand the true and the false in art ; he had taken her 
 to recitals of the Conservatoire, and even to rehearsals at the 
 great theatres, where, secured from observation, she could her- 
 self observe, and realised, as she listened, all the many traits 
 and the many eflbrts which go together to make up admirable 
 dramatic representation. He never allowed anyone to speak to 
 her, scarcely to see her, but he gave her thus that training of 
 the eye and of the ear without which no great artist can be 
 created. 
 
 ' Nature does much,' he said to her. ' Yes. But art is a 
 diffei'ent thing to ^nature. Art is three parts divine, but it is 
 one part human, and that human part requires the inost un- 
 wearied and elaborate training. The sculptor may bring a god 
 out of the clay in the fire and the fever of his inspiration, but 
 if he have not studied the laws of anatomy, the limbs of his 
 god will be out of projiortion, and one leg will be shorter than 
 the other.' 
 
 In the artistic circles there went a whisper about that Rosse- 
 lin had some paragon whom he was educating, and would pro- 
 duce some day ; but every one feared the sarcastic power of the 
 great artist's tongue too much to meddle, unasked, with his 
 concerns, and Damaris, under his guidance, passed unmolested, 
 almost unobserved, through the intricate mazes of that art- 
 world, which she touched without entering it. 
 
 One day, when she had been taken to a recital at the Con- 
 servatoire, he had left her alone for a few moments ; the recital 
 was over, the pupils had left the stage ; the professors were 
 conversing together ; from the floor there rose a cloud of dust, 
 and from the hot, pent air a strong noisome odour. Her eyes 
 ached, her temples throbbed ; she, whose whole life had been 
 passed in the fragrance of the open au', in the freshness of 
 buoyant sea winds, felt stifled, stunned, nauseated. Fame 
 itself seemed hateful, approached through this vitiated atmo- 
 sphere. To pass your yeai's in boxes of brick and stone, in cages 
 of wood and iron, rather than in the glad freedom of glancing 
 waters and unchecked movement over golden sands and flower- 
 ing meadows, was it not madness indeed % 
 
 She remembered the words of Othmar, bidding her live 
 the life that was led on the wide cornlands of La Beauce. All 
 that was strong in her, and born to freedom, and filled with the 
 love of the sea, and the joys of untrammelled movement through 
 sunlit air, and against fruit- scented breezes, i-ose in nausea and 
 revolt against the pent-up life of the artist in cities.
 
 252 OTH^rAR. 
 
 Where, oli where, was the open-air theatre of the Greeks, 
 •with no dome but the bhie sky, and the voices of the chorus 
 echoed by the sounds of tlie sea-waves breaking to surf upon 
 the marble stairs ? 
 
 'Wliat are you thinking of? Your eyes look wild,' said 
 Hosselin, rejoining her. 
 
 ' I -was thinking that I could never speak upon a covered 
 stage : the air would choke me ! ' 
 
 Kosselin looked at her in silence. He himself was think- 
 ing of Aimee Desclec, of the hoMmicnne who had always 
 wanted the fresh air, the free sunlight, the unpaid laughter, the 
 uiibought love. 
 
 Aim(je Desclee seemed to rise before him, and cry to him : 
 
 ' Why tempt another on my path? ' 
 
 He said to her solemnly and tenderly, while his voice 
 sounded very grave in the silence of the emptied theatre : 
 
 ' My dear, we cannot call back the Athens of Pindar for 
 you, nor yet give you the ideal world of your fancy. If you 
 want to be great in our world as it is, you must breathe its air, 
 v/hich is dust and chokes sensitive lungs. When the air is gold 
 (lust it is not much lighter to breathe, though people fancy it 
 light as the air of the planet Venus. If you decide that it will 
 be too weighty for yours, 1 do not say that you will not decide 
 wisely. Your friend Othmar has told you that obscurity and 
 liberty are the happier choice. He is a man who knows by 
 experience how painful a thraldom are eminence and Avealth. 
 You yourself may attain eminence, and wealth too, possibly, 
 probably, but you cannot do so and remain free to be all day 
 long under the blue sky. You must dwell in the air that is 
 full of dust, and poisoned by being shared by a million mouths. 
 That air killed Aimee Desclee.' 
 
 Damaris was silent. 
 
 She Avent out beside him through the sordid ways and 
 shabby passages of this temple of the acolytes of fame, and 
 thence into the crowded streets, which were grey with a leaden- 
 coloured slow rain. 
 
 Oil, how sweet the rain Avas in the country, scudding over 
 the green tields, brimming in the grass holes, hanging from the 
 orchard boughs, shining in the AvindoAV lattices, lying in the 
 great dock leaves ! How the snails came out in the glistening 
 roads, and tlie birds drank it from off the ground, and the 
 ducks went about in the little shallows it left, and how merry 
 and glad the Avhole land Avas ! 
 
 ' You love the country,' said Rosselin, when they had 
 walked the length of some streets in silence. ' You love the 
 country, my dear. Stay in it ; you have enough to live on ; 
 let faine go by, unsought, unmourned.' 
 
 Damaris sighed :
 
 OTHMAR. 253 
 
 ( ' 
 
 ' But if I do not do something great she will always say that 
 could not. She will alwaj's despise me. 
 ' Who ] ' 
 * His wife.' 
 'Othmar'sl' 
 
 'Yes. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' said Rosselin ; he understood the motives which 
 moved her more completely than she understood them herself. 
 ' Do not think of that capricious w^oman,' he said with irrita- 
 tion. ' Be sure tliat the day after she saw you she had forgot- 
 ten that you existed.' 
 
 The colour rose to the face of Damaris. 
 
 ' I wish to make her remember,' she said under her breath. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' said Rosselin once more. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 One evening in October Rosselin walked beside his pupil 
 amongst the fields of Les Hameaux. She had had her lesson 
 in elocution in the afternoon ; a lesson in which he was in- 
 exorably hard to please, a very tyrant over all the minutitie 
 of accent and of expression ; and now in the walks at sunset 
 he had relaxed intu all that benignity and bonhomie which were 
 most natural to him in the company of women and of children. 
 
 • I am afraid I do not please you,' she had said with some 
 dejection. 
 
 ' If you did not, my dear, do you think I w^ould come thrice 
 a week to Chevreuse to train you % ' he answered. ' It is 
 because you have exceeding natural talent, because you have 
 unconnnon gifts, a ilexible and beautiful voice, cpiick percep- 
 tions, and that intuitive comprehension which is the innermost 
 soul of art, that I deal Avith you harshly to compel you to 
 acquire all that artiGcial treatment of your own j^owers which 
 is absolutely indispensable to success. If I had not seen genius 
 in you it would not have been merely to please Othmar that I 
 would have told you to give yourself to art ; I should have said 
 to you, on the contrary : " Go and marry a farmer of La 
 Beauce, spin and sew, and wear a silk gown on Sundays ; have 
 any number of children ; be an ordinary woman in a word." ' 
 
 ' Marry a farmer of La Beauce ! ' 
 
 She coloured with indignation. Was it not what Othmar 
 himself had said to her *? 
 
 ' It is not a life to be despised,' continued Rosselin. ' They 
 live in corn as the crickets do. You, who are so fond of 
 country things, would be haj^py enough if — if — you had never 
 read Racine and Hugo, if you had not that fermentation of the 
 fancy in you which seethes and stii's and smokes until out of it
 
 254 OTHMAR. 
 
 comes the wine of genius. The swallows cannot stay in the 
 fields as the linnets do. There is something in them that 
 makes them go when the hour is come. They do not know 
 what it is ; they obey an imperious instinct. They cannot stay 
 if they would. They go blindly, and very often they drop 
 down dead in mid-ocean, and never see the rose fields of 
 Persia or the magnolia woods of Hindostan, as they meant to 
 do ; yet they go.' 
 
 Unknown to herself, a strong impulse moved her to prove 
 to the wife of Othmar that the hrin be genie was hers ; a true 
 bough of laurel, not a spurious weed. The indifference and the 
 oblivion of this, the first great lady she had ever seen, still 
 remained in her memory with the sting of an affront which 
 nothing could effixce. The world was represented to her eyes 
 by that one delicate, smiling, negligent, cruel critic, whom she 
 passionately admired, whom she unconsciously challenged. The 
 child had no vanity, but she had great pride ; the pride of the 
 aristocrat and the pride of the republican had been inherited 
 by her, each stubborn as the other. Her pride had been 
 wounded, and her ambition and her dreams excited. She 
 knew that she might drop, like the tired swallow that crosses 
 the sea, into the deep abyss of failure and oblivion ; but, like 
 the swallow, the instinct which moved her was irresistible. 
 
 Kosselin saw that it was so, and he was too utterly an artist 
 in every fibre of his being to be able to prevail on himself to 
 discourage her wholly. He believed that she would become the 
 glory of the French stage ; that very union of the strength of 
 the peasant and the delicacy of the patrician, which was so 
 marked in her physically and mentally, seemed to him to pos- 
 sess that rare originality which all those destined to be great 
 in any art are stamped with from their birth. He did not 
 admit to her how much he admired her, but when she recited 
 to him at one lesson those passages which had been set to her 
 at a previous one, he was secretly amazed at the justness of her 
 reading of them, the accuracy of her rendering, and he mar- 
 velled where in her simple life, set between sea and sky as it 
 had been, she had reached such understanding of the greatest 
 utterances of great minds. 
 
 ' Yet what a fool I am to wonder,' he thought a moment 
 later. ' As if it were not always so with genius, or as if any- 
 thing less than that ever could be genius.' 
 
 But he took care not to utter that word often to her. All 
 he ever granted to her was that she might arrive at something, 
 perhaps, if she studied hard ; if she were resolute and yet 
 humble ; if she accepted all his corrections and instructions, 
 and did her best to lose that southern accent which would 
 Bend all Paris into Homeric laughter if it were ever heard upon 
 any stage.
 
 OTHMAR. 255 
 
 * It could only be permitted,' he added, 'if you were reciting 
 Mireille.' 
 
 She did not know what he meant, but she listened to his 
 pure and exquisite pronunciation, and did her uttermost 
 docilely to acquire it, as to obey and execute all his teachings. 
 
 Then, when their lesson was over, not seldom he would 
 unbend utterly, and strolling with her through the meadows, 
 or sitting beneath the trelliswork of the porch with the rose 
 leaves falling on his white hair, he would tell her the most 
 wonderful and enchanting of stories, merely drawing all of 
 them from the innumerable treasures of that wonder-horn, his 
 own manifold experiences. He said not a woi'd that would 
 hurt her. All that would bo learnt soon enough. 
 
 ' J'eji ai vv, tant ! ' he would think often as he left the Croix 
 Blanche in the wai^ra evenings. He had seen the world devour 
 so many, like the dragons that were fed on white flesh. But 
 he fancied she would be one of those who bind the dragon, like 
 St. Marguerite, and make it follow them slavishly. 
 
 She had strength in her, the strength of the old mountain 
 race of Be'rarde. He knew nothing of those dead people who 
 had ruled land and sea in the dark ages, and perished finally 
 \nider the axe on the scaftbld ; but there were a vitality and a 
 force in her which seemed to him destined to conquer where 
 weaker natures gave way and failed. 
 
 Provided only, he thought, provided only that she would 
 have as many passions as there were grains of sand on her own 
 sea-shores, but amongst them all no real love. 
 
 Passion is the most useful of teachers to any artist ; that he 
 knew ; but love is the destruction of all art. INIademoiselle 
 Mars lived through a blaze of glory ; Adrienne Lecouvreur died 
 in her youth. Rosselin did not trouble himself about conven- 
 tional morality. He took the world as he had found it. He 
 respected this child's supreme innocence, and would not have 
 sullied it by a breath ; but, casting her horoscope, he would have 
 given her the heart of Eacliel, not that of Desclee, if he had had 
 the power. It is better to be the tigress which preys than the 
 hind which bleeds. 
 
 He was no cynic ; he only knew the world well, and well 
 knew what the world makes of women. 
 
 On est broye, ou on broie les autres. There is no middle path 
 for those who once have left the cool secluded ways of privacy 
 and joined the crowd which pushes at the brazen gates of fame. 
 
 But still, to Rosselin, to have passed these gates seemed the 
 perfection of human triumph. 
 
 ' What all who are not artists underrate,' he said to Damaris, 
 as they passed beside the round tower of the dovecote, ' is tlie 
 artist's joy in the mere power of expression. It is a mistake to 
 suppose that it is the ignis fatnus of celebrity which allures tliQ
 
 256 OTHMAR 
 
 young poet, the young musician, the young painter ; that ia 
 very secondary with him. What overmasters him is the longing 
 for the opportunity of expression; the besoin dc se faire scntlr, 
 which is as powerful and imperious as the besoin d'aimcr. I 
 fii-st played in a barn to villagers ; I liad a grand part, Robert 
 Macaire ; I was as perfectly happy as when I later on played at 
 tlie Fran9ais to emperors and their courtiers. It is the same 
 delight as the lark feels in singing, as the swan feels in swim- 
 ming, as the heron feels in slowly sailing througli the air : the 
 ecstasy in the expansion of natural powers. But the majority 
 of men know nothing of that. The custom-house officer would 
 not believe that Berlioz was composing music as he sat on a 
 rock above the sea. They laughed in his face and said : " Where 
 is your piano 1 " This is as far as the world goes ; it under- 
 stands the piano, but not the music which is mute in the soul.' 
 He rested as he spoke on a stone of what had once been tlie 
 great ' abbey of the fields : ' the fields were there unchanged, it 
 was only the great thinkers wliose Ijrains were dust. 
 
 ' I had no such romantic cradle as you possessed in your 
 island of orange groves,' he continued. ' I was born in a little 
 dusky, close, noisome shop in a back street of Vierzon, that 
 dreary town of our dreary district of the Sologne. My grand- 
 father had been born in that shop before me. Everything in it 
 was poverty-stricken, ugly, vulgar, sordid ; and vulgarity is so 
 much worse than any ugliness, and sordid small aims and hopes 
 are so much worse than any poverty ! Of course no one need 
 be ignoble in a shop, even in a shop where they sell tallow. I 
 suppose Garibaldi was not, but my people were. Well, in that 
 little stuffy plebeian den, only frequented by the lowest of the 
 ironworkers and the canal bargemen, beautiful fancies thronged 
 on me and noble visions haunted, me, as they did you in your 
 sea-girt orange thickets, and I used to sit in my hideous attic 
 and. recite verse to the one star which was all I could see 
 through a chink in the wall, as you did, you tell me, to the 
 whole of tlie southern skies glowing above your balcony. It 
 was not fame that I wanted ; I never thought of it ; I longed 
 to hear my own voice in the glory of tlie words ; I longed to 
 leap up and shout to all the sleeping town ; I longed to cry out 
 to the Immortals, wherever they were, "I have understood 
 you, I am not unworthy!" Ah, those beautiful impersonal 
 enthu.siasms of youth ! Fame ! It is of notiiing so narrow or 
 so seltish tliat we think ! ' 
 
 The tears rose to his eyes : half a century and more liad 
 rolled away from him ; he was a boy again, dreaming lii.s die uns 
 as he wandered over the sandy wastes of the Sologne. 
 
 'Ah, my dear,' he said with a sigh, 'how miserable I 
 thought I was in that little ugly house, with the sluggish canal 
 water slipping past its walls, and the black-faced iron puddlera
 
 OTHMAR. 257 
 
 quarrelling over my father's short weight ! It stifled me ; it 
 cramiDed me ; it killed me ! so I thought. But I got away from 
 it, nevertheless. Pegasus came for me in the shape of a towing- 
 horse, wliich carried me away to Issoudun first, and to a new 
 life afterwards. I had the seven lean years as a strolling 
 ])layer ; a jack at a pinch, a Jean-qui-rit or a Jean-qui-'pleure, as 
 it was wanted ; and then I had more than thrice over the seven 
 fat years, and all that men call success. I have had all the 
 best tilings that there are in life, and I do not think I should 
 have had as many of them if I had remained in the dingy little 
 shop all my days, as my father wished me to do. Poor old 
 father ! he came to see me once in Paris— once, when I was 
 thirty years old, and in the height of my best triumphs ; and 
 he was dazzled and dazed, and did not very well understand, 
 but he found out that my servants charged me four times too 
 mucli a pound for candles. " Un grand homme tui ! '_' he said, 
 with a sneer at me, ' ' ct tu n' sals pas le prix cVnne bougie ! " The 
 world admired me : he never did. I was always to him a fool 
 who burned wax instead of tallow. There is always something 
 to be said for the bourgeois i5oint of view ; but it is narrow — 
 narrow. After all, the storms and sunshine on Parnassus are 
 better than the worry over a lost centime in tlie back parlour. 
 I have been a successful artist in my day, but I should have 
 been a very indifferent shopkeeper, because I never could bring 
 myself to care for that lost centime — though I have lost 
 many !' 
 
 He rose with a laugh, remembering the grand gaspillage of 
 his generous and careless manhood. It had not been wise, per- 
 haps, but it had been delightful ; and, after all, he had as much 
 as he wanted now in his little river- side house, his good wall 
 fruits, and his first editions of Moliere and of Marivaux. He 
 would not have been a whit happier had he been a million- 
 aire. 
 
 As the frank mellow sound of his laughter echoed on the 
 air, and the shadow of the doves' tower lengthened behind 
 them on the grass, the notes of a horn in the fanfare which 
 is called La Brisee, blew loud and full over the fields to their 
 ears. 
 
 ' What is that 1 ' cried Damaris, startled at the sound which 
 she had never heard before. 
 
 ' I forgot ; it is the first day for hunting,' said Rosselin, 
 listening. ' It is the ouverture de la chasse.'' 
 
 As he spoke some equestrians rode out from a thicket across 
 the field in which they were. They were members of the hunt 
 of Dampierre, clad in a picturesque costume and looking like a 
 picture of the time of Louis Quinze as the warm sunset light 
 fell across them. They rode on quickly towards the west 
 wlience came the notes of the hunting fanfare. 
 
 S
 
 258 OTHMAR. 
 
 They did not look toAvards herself or Rosseliii ; but a few 
 seconds later another huntsman, whose hunter was lame, caiae 
 l)y in their wake more slowly, leading his horse. He turned 
 his head, paused a moment or two, then rode straight towards 
 them. 
 
 It was the Due de Bethune. He doflFed his tricornered 
 gold-laced hat and bade Rosselin, whom he knew well, good- 
 evening ; then glanced at Damaris. 
 
 ' Mademoiselle Berarde ! ' he said, hesitatingly. ' Surely I 
 do not mistake ? ' 
 
 She looked at him with recognition. 
 
 ' You came to the island with her,' she said, rather to her- 
 self than to him. The colour grew hot in her face ; all the 
 unforgettable shame of that day was with her in bitter recol- 
 lection. 
 
 ' I am honoured by so much remembrance, and grateful to 
 the hole in the turf which lamed my horse.' 
 
 ' That is language for the chateau of Dampierre,' said 
 Rosselin. ' M. le Due has lost his way, I think % ' 
 
 'No ; 1 know my road,' said Bethune, who understood the 
 old man's meaning. ' And I never speak any language, 
 Rosselin, but that wliich best conveys my real thoughts. You, 
 who are so perfect an artist in speech, must be aware that I am 
 a very clumsy one. Is there any smith here who could look to 
 my poor beast % ' 
 
 ' You can put him up at the house Avhere I live,' said 
 Damaris. ' It is a very little way off ; we can show you.' 
 
 ' That will be sweetest charity,' said Bethune. 
 
 Rosselin did not see his way to prevent what annoyed him. 
 The Duke, with the bridle over his arm, walked beside her over 
 the jjasture ; the notes of the Brisee had ceased ; the hunt had 
 passed onward westward, where Dampierre was. 
 
 Bethune spoke to her with deference and interest, but she 
 answered him briefly and absently. Rosselin kept up the con- 
 versation. Suddenly she said in a low tone : 
 
 ' You have seen her — lately ? ' 
 
 Bethune was surprised. 
 
 ' You mean the Countess Othmar, your hostess of St. 
 Pharamond ? Yes ; I saw her a week ago. We stayed together 
 at the same country house in Austria, and I shall soon see her 
 again at Amyot. That is her castle, as I dare say you know, 
 on the Loire.' 
 
 Damaris said nothing. She paced onward, a little in ad- 
 vance of him and of Rosselin ; her head was drooped, her face 
 was thoughtful. 
 
 ' She was not as kind to you in appearance that day as, I 
 assure you, that she was in feeling,' said Be'thune, not knowing 
 well what to say. ' She is capricious and negligent, but she
 
 OTHMAR. 259 
 
 has a mind that is very generous and true in its instincts, and 
 those instincts were all _yonr friends and admirers.' 
 
 Daniaris remained silent. 
 
 ' The chief instinct of the lady you speak of is to provide 
 herself with amusement,' said Rosselin curtly. 'She usually 
 fails, because the world is so small.' 
 
 'You are unjust to her,' said Be'thune, her loj'al servant 
 and courtier. ' I am sure tliat she felt the truest interest in 
 INIademoiselle Berarde. We were all of us distressed when we 
 learned that that magic isle was tenantless.' 
 
 'The new Virginie has left her isle,' said Rosselin, 'and I 
 am endeavouring that she shall not make shipwreck on these 
 stormy seas of art and life. My dear duke, great ladies like 
 your chatelaine of Amyot let fall idle words, nei'er thinking 
 what they may bring forth. It is so easy to destroy content 
 and to suggest ambition. But to eflace a suggestion is very 
 hard when once it has taken I'oot in a young mind.' 
 
 Be'thune guessed at his meaning. ' The world will be the 
 gainer,' he said, as they entered the courtyard of the Croix 
 Blanclie. 
 
 Damaris called a man to his horse, then, without even look- 
 ing at him, she crossed the court and went indoors, and he saw 
 her no more. 
 
 ' She is very much changed,' said Bethune in surprise as 
 he looked at the dusky archway of the door through whose 
 shadows she had passed from his sight. 'What is her story 
 since I saw her on that happy island ; 1 shall never forget it ; 
 its blue sea, its radiant air, its scent of orange-flowers, its hand- 
 some child reciting to us from Esther — it was a poem. Are 
 you going to make a great artist of her ? Tell me her story 
 since that day I saw her on her isle.' 
 
 ' I do not know it,' said Rosselin. ' All I have to do with is 
 the Muse in her. My dear Duke, I repeat, your gracious Lady 
 of Amyot, for her own diversion, poured into a childish brea.st 
 a little drop of that divine curiosity which men call ambition : 
 it was only a drop but it burned its way into the soul, and will 
 eat up the life before it has done, I dare say. Madame Nadege 
 did not care what mischief she did : oh no : she only wanted to 
 while away an empty hour for herself.' 
 
 Bethune reddened indignant for his absent sovereign. 
 
 ' As you are so great an artist yourself you should think that 
 she did well in waking any soul to art.' 
 
 ' No,' said Rosselin angrily. ' No one does well who vaeddlea 
 with fate or displaces peaceful ignorance and honest content by 
 unrest and desire. This child was happy on her island. The 
 world may perchance make her famous some day, but happy it 
 will never make her again, for happiness is not amongst its 
 gifts ! ' 
 
 s2
 
 26o OTHMAR. 
 
 'That is quite true,' said Bethune with a sigh. He asked 
 many more questions, but obtained little information. He 
 ■waited in vain for Damaris to re-appear. The sun sank, the 
 shadows deepened into dusk over all the vale, the swallows 
 circled in their last flight round the high house roofs. With 
 reluctance he was forced to bid adieu to Rosselin and take his 
 way t» the distant chateau of Dampierre, Avhere he was a 
 guest. 
 
 ' Salute her for me,' he said at parting. ' Say that I shall 
 return to thank her to-morrow.' 
 
 ' If you wish to do her any service in return for the help to 
 your horse, do not speak of her at Dampierre or in Paris,' said 
 llosselin. 
 
 ' I will not speak of her to anyone,' returned Bethune, 
 ' unless it be to the Countess Othmar. But you will allow me 
 to return.' 
 
 ' I have no power to forbid you. Yet it is to her that perhaps 
 it would be desirable you should say nothing,' answered Rosselin 
 after a moment of hesitation. ' I merely mean that the Lady 
 of Amyot did, I believe, prophesy a great career for my pupil, 
 and first of all suggest to her the possible possession of talente 
 the world might recognise. For that reason I think Damaris 
 Berarde would prefer that she should hear nothing more of her, 
 unless some day the world itself may have justified herpredictions.' 
 
 ' You think it probable, or you would not waste your hours 
 
 on her ? ' 
 
 ' I think she has infinite feeling and a poetic temperament. 
 AVhether these ai'e enough remains to be seen. There are so 
 many other qualities required, all those humbler qualities which 
 aie the prose of genius, the plain bread of character.' 
 
 ' Slie has one re([uisito, beauty. She is exceedingly hand- 
 some. What brought her here \ ' 
 
 ' I cannot say : I am only her teacher.' 
 
 'And who is her lover ? ' mused Bethune, as he walked slowly 
 out of the grey courtyard in the gloaming. His suspicions drifted 
 to Loswa. 
 
 Rosselin went within and mounted a low wooden staircase 
 which led to the door of Damaris's chamber. 
 
 ' Come out and bid me good-night, my dear. If I loiter I 
 shall lose the last train to Paris.' 
 
 She obeyed liim and came outside her door. 
 
 ' Why did you avoid Bethune % ' he asked her. ' He is a 
 gentleman and a soldier ; he is a man you may respect and who 
 will respect you ; though he is a great noble he is an honest 
 fellow. He is one of the few lovers who have worshipped 
 Othmar's wife without losing dignity or honour.' 
 
 Damaris did not answer. Slie could not well have defined 
 ■vv'hy she had come within doors. There was a certain pain to
 
 OTHMAR. 261 
 
 her in the presence of Bethunc because he was associated with 
 that one day so big, for her, with fate. 
 
 Rosselin looked at her as she stood in the twilight at the 
 head of the stairs. There was an open window behind her, a 
 hand's breadth of blue sky, a bough of pear heavy with fruit. 
 
 ' Why did you not mention Othmar to him % ' he said abruptly ; 
 * you mentioned her.' 
 
 ' I do not know,' said Damaris. She spoke the truth. 
 She did not know why she was always reluctant to speak of 
 him. 
 
 ' Good-night, my child,' said Rosselin, with a tenderness in 
 his voice that was new to her ear. He sighed as he too went on 
 his way through the dusky dewy fields, sweet with the breath 
 of browsing cattle and murmurous with the whispers of the 
 leaves. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 When Othmar returned to Paris he paid Rosselin a visit. 
 
 ' You have bcien to Chevreuse % ' asked Rosselin. ' No ? ' 
 ' No,' said Otlimar with sincerity and some annoyance, ' I am 
 still at Amyot. I only come to Paris occasionally. Is she well ? 
 Are you satisfied \ ' 
 
 ' She is quite well,' replied Rosselin. ' The answer to the 
 other question is less simple. I am satisfied with her talent, not 
 with her character.' 
 
 'What do you mean 1 ' 
 
 ' Oh, nothing that is her fault. I merely meant that she is, 
 as Madame la Comtesse once said, " tme sensitive." Such people 
 have no business in public careers. You do not make street- 
 pcjsts out of the stems of a sensitive plant. The Latins gave the 
 statues that were destined to stand in thoroughfares brass discs 
 to protect them. If you have not the brass disc you must not 
 stand even in the peristyle of a theatre.' 
 
 ' I do not think she is weak. Had she been weak she would 
 not have left the island as she did.' 
 
 ' ^Vho is talking of weakness ? — I mean that she is not of 
 a temper for the coarse career of the stage, which is always 
 passed in the press and glare of a stormy crowd. She would 
 play Dona Sol divinely to an audience of poets on your terraces 
 at Amyot vmder a midsummer moon. But it is unfortunately 
 not a question of playing it so, but on the stages of public 
 theatres, where very often the coarse applause of the friendly 
 ignorant is still more offensive than the envenomed vituperation 
 of the hostile critic. I dare say we can make her fit for this. We 
 can give her the brass disc, but it will apoil the tine white marble 
 Avhen we fasten it to it. My dear Count Othmar, you know 
 what the life of a great actress in Paris is ; you know what it
 
 262 OTHMAR. 
 
 will be for her. We need not spend words on details. Is it a 
 good action that we do when we encourage her to qualify herself 
 for it, or is it a bad one % ' 
 
 Othmar heard him with distress. He was always haunted 
 by the memory that his wife, by a few careless words, had 
 broken up for ever that simple, peaceful, healthful, flower-like 
 life which Damaris Berarde had led in Bonaventure. The 
 power of all the kings of the earth could not have replaced her 
 in it. 
 
 ' It is her choice,' he said, after a silence of some mo- 
 ments. 
 
 ' Is fate ever wholly choice 1 ' said Rosselin. ' And when 
 a child says he will be a soldier, what does he know of war, of 
 wounds, of the sickening stench of the rotting dead, of the 
 maladies which kill men in hundreds like murrained cattle ? 
 Nothing : he thinks it all iambour et trompette and Fte Vidis! 
 Your friend at Chevreuse knows no more of what the life of 
 the theatre is than the child knows of war, and I for one have 
 not the courage to enlighten her. Have you ? She dreams of 
 all kinds of glories ; she does not see the rouge-pot, the white 
 powder, the claque, the press, the lovers, the diamonds, the 
 ugliness, the vulgaiity, the money bags, the whole ronde du 
 diable. She thinks she will be Dona Sol, be Esther, be Rosa- 
 lind, off the stage as well as on it. Who is to tell her the mis- 
 take she makes 1 ' 
 
 ' Surely you can, if anyone 1 ' 
 
 ' No, I cannot. You cannot make a mind conceive a thing 
 wholly inconceivable to it. I can say a certain number of 
 words certainly to her ; produce a certain effect ; suggest some 
 images to her which will be painful and revolting. But when 
 I have done that I shall not have done much ; 1 shall not have 
 produced any real impression on her, because the advice which 
 I mean will not in itself be intelligible to her. I may talk as I 
 Avill of war to the child ; but I sliall never be able to make him 
 see what I have seen in the days of the siege of Paris, wliich 
 sometimes still turns me sick when I awake at night and think 
 of it. Perhaps it is because I grow old, and, so, sentimental 
 that I am troubled with those scruples which I do not suppose 
 would have suggested themselves to me twenty, or even ten 
 years ago ; but I certainly do feel that I have not done what 
 contents me in jireparing Damaris Berarde for the art of the 
 stage. She will be a great artist, I believe, but she will be a 
 miserable woman.' 
 
 Otlnnar heard him with anxiety and pain. The vision of 
 her was always before him as lie had left her in the red browii. 
 grass with the evening skies beliind her. Country peace, 
 woodland silences, fresh air of early autumn, simple pleasures of 
 youth — these would find no placa in life into which she had
 
 O Til MAR. 263 
 
 been led to enter. Some, losing them early, long for tliem all 
 their lives. 
 
 ' I suppose, continued Rosselin, ' that the imagination in 
 nie is dying out ; as one grows old one drops illusions, as old 
 trees drop branch after branch on the ground, tdl there is 
 nothing left but the trunk, and perhaps a woodpecker in it, 
 l^crhaps nothing except dust. Certainly twenty years ago I 
 should have said, and should have thoroughly believed, that 
 art — any art — was worth any sacrifice. But now I do not 
 think so. One pays too heavily for any kind of fame. To be 
 famous at all is to have all tlie doors and windows of your house 
 standing wide open, and a mob, all eyes and ears, for ever star- 
 ing in and watching you as you eat, as you drink, as you sleep, 
 as you play, aye, even as you weep by your child's coffin or 
 draw the shroud over the breast of your dead mistress. Once 
 famous, you never can laugh or can cry in solitude ever again. 
 Either to throw laurel crowns at you or to pelt you with stones, 
 the mob is always pushing in over your threshold. When boys 
 and gii"ls dream of fame they do not know what it is — the 
 eternal adieu to privacy, the eternal self-surrender to the crowd. 
 Alkibiades loved the crowd ; there are many like him in all 
 centuries ; but les sensitives hate it, shrink from it, tiy to bar 
 it out with their bare arm, wliich gets broken in the struggle, 
 like the Scottish maiden's in history. The price paid is too 
 heavy. All the shade and the freshness and the quiet leafy 
 by-paths of life are denied us for ever. There is only the great 
 high-road, the crude hard light, the gaping multitude that stare 
 and grin till we give up the ghost ! The imce is too heavy. It 
 is the same curse as the curse which lies on kings, never to be 
 alone. ' 
 
 He sighed as he turned and walked up the little path of his 
 cottage garden. Looking back upon his life he seemed to have 
 tlu-own his years to the mob as oflal is thrown to a pack of 
 hounds. 
 
 It was only a mood, a passing mood, but there was a great 
 truth in it. 
 
 ' One needs not to be famous to suffer that curse,' said 
 Othmar. ' Whoever is in the world has it. Private life is a 
 thing of the past ; we are all expected to dine and to sup, and 
 to spread our bridal-beds and our death-beds, in public, like the 
 monarchs of old. An age which has invented the electric light 
 has abolished solitude and respects no privacy ; it will end in 
 forcing all dmcs d'elite to find and form a new Thebaul.' 
 
 ' If they can anywhere find a square mile without a traniAvay 
 and a telephone ! ' said Rosselin, tenderly touching a tea-rose 
 whicli blossomed in the cold wet weather against the low white 
 wall of his house. 
 
 Then he said abruptly :
 
 264 OTHMAR 
 
 ' What does your wife say no^y of lier second Desclee ? ' 
 
 Otlimar was angered to feel that the natural intei-rogatiou 
 embarrassed him. 
 
 ' My wife has forgotten both her prophecies and the subject 
 of them,' he said with a certain impatience and bitterness in 
 the accent with which the words were spoken. 
 
 ' And you have not refreshed her memory ? ' 
 
 ' ] think it would be useless.' 
 
 Rosselin was silent : he was not pleased. He angrily 
 thought of Bethune, and wondered if he would speak of his 
 encounter with Damaris. 
 
 ' Some one will tell her if you do not,' he said with some 
 significance. ' Pardon me if 1 say too much, but I dislike con- 
 cealments ; they are usually iniwise and seldom profitable. 
 Chevreuse is not a vale in Venus or Polaris, that we can be 
 sure no one will ever see your ^ro^e^ce .' ' 
 
 ' Anyone may see her,' said Othmar, with annoyance and 
 hauteur. ' But to recall to my wife a subject she has forgotten 
 demands a courage of which I frankly confess myself not the 
 possessor.' 
 
 ' Humpli ! ' said Bosselin with dubious accent : he was not 
 satisfied. It seemed to him that embarrassing complications 
 would of necessity grow up out of so much needless reticence. 
 Othmar, he thought, was most probably not aware himself of 
 all the various and confused motives which disposed him to 
 silence on the name of Damaris. 
 
 ' She is not of a facile character, he thought, recalling all he 
 had ever heard of the caprices and cruelties of Nadine Napraxine 
 in her youth. ' But when there is a nettle in questioii it is 
 always best to grasp it boldly. Besides, if she be so indifferent 
 as they say, the whole thing would be of infinitesimal insigni- 
 ficance to her, unless concealment were to lend it an importance 
 not its own, as some shadows can be thrown on a white wall so 
 as to make a beetle loom largo as an ox.' 
 
 ' Chevreuse, moreover,' continued Othmar, 'is a place that 
 no one ever sees in winter. Unless it be in the few Aveeks 
 when Danipierre is occujiied, not a soul of our world ever goes 
 there. If she mean or hope to become famous with the fame 
 you decry, she is best thiTo in solitude ; if, on the contrary, 
 she fail it will be still well that none should know her efforts 
 who would not pity them. My wife is like the Latins, she has 
 no altar to pity ; she despises it. If the world ever ajiplaud 
 Damaris Bdrarde, then and then only shall I venture to recall 
 to her the prophecy slie made at St. Pharamond.' 
 
 'If with her nothing succeeds like success she only follows 
 the world,' said Ilossolin. ' I thought slie led it ? ' 
 
 ' She does lead it : but she has great contempt for those who 
 fail in it. When a lamb fjvlls from fatigue on the Australian
 
 OTHMAR. 265 
 
 plains the shepherd tvalks on and leaves it to its fate. Those 
 Avho fail seem to my wife as the fallen lambs do to the shepherd : 
 that is all.' 
 
 ' Damaris Be'rarde will not fail,' said Rosselin, with a sense 
 of anger and of triumph in her. 
 
 ' Aimee Desclee did not fail— but she died.' 
 
 ' Damaris will not die ; she is too strong ; but she may break 
 her heart over broken illusions, as a thorough-bred horse breaks 
 his over bad roads. Good God, what a beautiful world it would 
 be if it were like the world these youths and maidens see in 
 their dreams ! ' 
 
 ' She may break her heart over broken illusions.' 
 
 The words haunted Othmar's memory as he left the cottage 
 at Asnieres. Yes, that was often the death of the strongest, 
 death mental and moral if not death physical. 
 
 What he had done for her had secured her future from want, 
 had given her a safe home for so long as she would be content 
 with it ; but how much more was there for which no prescience 
 could provide, from which no friendship could secure her ! 
 With her ardent temperament, her ignorance of life, her poetic 
 and unwise impulses, how much would her heart ask and her 
 imajjinatiou demand ! She would not, could not, lead the pas- 
 sionless life of passionless natures. Whom would she love? 
 Would love only be for her the Charon who took her through a 
 river of hell to the shores of death, as he had been to Aimee 
 Desclee? 
 
 Or would she leave behind her all those beautiful faiths and 
 fancies, all those innocent ardours and tender thoughts, as the 
 year leaves behind it the blossoms of spring, the young green of 
 April : and would she become famous and flattered, leading the 
 world in a leash, and putting her foot on the necks of her 
 lovers ? 
 
 He liked one vision as little as the other. 
 
 Either way the sea-bird of Bonaventure would be no more ; 
 either way the child who had gone away from him in the moon- 
 light under the silver shadows of the olive-trees and of the 
 niists of dawn would be as dead as though she were in her grave. 
 Would the time ever come when she would say to him, ' Why 
 did you not let me die on the stones of Paris instead of keeping 
 life in me for tliis ? ' Or would time give her that brazen disk 
 of which Rosselin had spoken, and with it the heart of bronze 
 wliich all must have instead of a heart of tlcsh and blood if tliey 
 would go triumphant through the heat and pressure of the world? 
 Rosselin had said aright, that the disk of brass would spoil the 
 fair white statue, and the heart of bronze, the heart of the 
 mockers of men, the heart of Venus Lubetina, would it ever be 
 hers ? 
 
 He went home to his owu house, where he was e.x;pecting his
 
 266 OTHMAR. 
 
 wife's return that evening. He v.-ent into his own rooms and 
 looked at the sketch made by Loris Loswa. Tlie sight of it 
 troubled and disturbed him. He had a sense of wrong doing 
 upon him of which, when lie searched his own conscience, he 
 could with honesty declare liimself blameless. He had put her 
 as much out of his own hands as it had been possible to do, and 
 the simple ruse, by which he had been able to provide for her 
 maintenance seemed as innocent as any pretence by which the 
 motherless lamb can be persuaded to eat or the unfledged bird 
 to let itself be befriended by gentle hands. Still it had been 
 a subterfuge ; it had been an untruth ; and he hated the merest 
 shadow of falsehood. His detestation of it had been the con- 
 stant subject of Friederich Othmar's ridicule and sarcasm, and 
 the elder man had in vain argued with him a thousand times, 
 to endeavour to prove to him that it is, in the hands of a skilled 
 casuist, at once the most forcible and the most delicate of 
 weapons. He had always refused to admit its virtues ; it seemed 
 to him a craven and contemptible thing, however dressed up 
 with Avit and wisdom. 
 
 That Blanchette de Laon had seen him at Chevreuso had 
 kept him from returning thither, and it also made him feel the 
 absolute necessity of acquainting his wife with all he had done 
 for Damaris before Rumour, with her hundx'ed tongues, and 
 Avomen, with their devilish ingenuity in exaggeration and sugges- 
 tion, should have bruited the tale abroad in some guise wholly 
 unlike the truth of it. If he could by good fortune place the 
 story before her in such a light that it would move her finer and 
 more generous impulses, then all would be well. But this was 
 so doubtful ; the quixotism of his own conduct would be the 
 first thing which would strike her, and she would probably be 
 unsparing in her ridicule of it. Besides, the reception of his 
 narrative Avould wholly depend on her mood, on the trifles of 
 the moment, on the facts of whether or no she were in a sym- 
 pathetic and. kindly humour. Any trifle would do to determine 
 that : if the rooms were not heated enough, if the flowers in 
 them were not those she liked, if the costumes of the coming 
 season seemed ugly to her, or if she had caught a slight chill on 
 her journey — any one of these things, or anything similar to 
 them, would make any appeal to her generosity and sympathy 
 worse than useless. 
 
 He had been so long accustomed to study the barometer of 
 her caprices that he dreaded its mutability. He knew that there 
 were in her instincts and elements of nobility, even of greatness, 
 which, could she have been cast on troublous times and dire 
 disasters, would have made her rise to sacrifice, even to heroism. 
 As it was, in her perpetual self-gratification, her unlimited 
 power of command, her l)cd of unruflled roses, and her atmo- 
 sphere of incessant adulation, all the capriciousness and egotism
 
 OTHMAR. 267 
 
 of her nature were encouraged and nursed to overweening 
 growtli. 
 
 In the depths of her nature were those finer qualities which 
 will always respond to the appeal of higher emotions in momenta 
 of extremity or the hours of great calamity or of great peril. 
 She would have had the dignity of Marie Antoinette before the 
 Convention, the courage of Anne de Montfort before Philippe 
 de Yalois, the strength of IMaria Theresa before Europe. But 
 nothing less than the inspiration of such supreme hours of life 
 could have penetrated the indifference of her temperament, and 
 the trivialities and the frivolities of modern existence could 
 never do so for an instant. 
 
 Had he sought her pardon for some great crime, sought her 
 fidelity through some great ruin, he might, he probably would 
 have aroused the latent forces and sympathies dormant in her 
 character ; she would not have given him a stone when he 
 had asked for bread. But in the things of daily life he had 
 found her too often without mercy to have in her mercies much 
 trust. 
 
 The conviction that she would never give him the compre- 
 hension which he wished made him withhold all other utterances 
 of his deeper emotions and more tender thoughts. He had 
 gone to her in one supreme moment of pain, and he had received 
 a rebuff such as repels for long, if not for ever, a sensitive 
 nature. 
 
 She did not realise that her infinite comprehension of the 
 moods and minds of others was marred to them by the chill 
 raillery which accompanied her acute perceptions. She did not 
 remember that though to herself the dilemmas and the weak- 
 nesses, even the passions which she studied were objects of 
 amused ridicvde, tbey were to those on whom she studied them 
 subjects of great moment, and often of as great suffering. 
 
 Even the men who most blindly loved her were afraid to 
 confide in her, because of the inevitable irony with which their 
 confidence was certain to be met. Many a time Othmar himself 
 had longed to lean his head on her knees, and lay bare to her 
 all the contradictions, and longings, and regrets of his soul ; 
 but he had never dared to do so, because he had always shrunk 
 from the certain mockery which would, he knew, point through 
 all her sympathy, if sympathy she would ever give. Her com- 
 prehension of human nature made her in one sense the most 
 lenient of auditors ; but in another sense she was the most un- 
 sparing : she could pardon easily, but she could never promise 
 not to ridicule. That one fact held sensitive natures aloof from 
 her with all the force of a scourge. 
 
 ' She will deem me such a fool,' he thought often : and then 
 he kept silence. 
 
 He went this evening down to the Gare du Nord to receive
 
 ^68 OTHMAR. 
 
 her, and almost before the train had j^aused he had entered the 
 saloon carriage in which she had travelled undisturbed since she 
 had left Berlin. There was always in him something of the 
 eagerness after absence of a lover ; her mere presence always 
 exercised over him a magnetism and a charm. 
 
 She raised herself on her elbow from the mass of sable furs 
 and of wadded satin on which she had been lying ; she had been 
 rudely awakened by the cessation of the train's movement ; the 
 blaze of a lamp was in her eyes ; she was impatient, and she 
 yawned. 
 
 ' Otho ! my dear Otho ! ' she said with petulance, ' why will 
 you always come to meet one at a railway station % Of all the 
 many absurd customs of our generation that is the most absurd. 
 Nobody's emotions are so poignant that they cannot wait till 
 one comes into the house. \ was asleep. What a cold night ! 
 Why cannot they devise something which would carry the train 
 straight to one's bedside % All their inventions are very clumsy 
 after all' 
 
 She was slowly raising herself from her heap of furs and 
 red satin ; her eyes were languid with arrested sleep ; her tone 
 was irritable and irritating : she scarcely seemed to perceive his 
 I>resence ; the sweet delicate odour as of tea-roses with which all 
 her clothes were always impregnated came to him well known 
 as the accents of her voice. A curious passion of conflicting 
 feeling passed over him ; he could have seized her in his arms 
 and cried aloud to her, ' I have given you all my life, do you 
 give me no more than this"?' Yet he felt chilled, angered, 
 alienated, silenced for the moment ; a feeling which was almost 
 di>like came over him ; it seemed to him as if he had poured 
 out all the love of his life upon her and received in return a 
 mere handful of ice and snoAV. But the inexorable haste and 
 vulgar trivialities of modern exigencies left him no moment for 
 thought or for the expression of it. He could only offer iier his 
 hand in silence to assist her to alight, and give her his arm and 
 lead her through the throngs of the Northern Terminus to her 
 own carriage. 
 
 He drove with her through the streets to their own house 
 and escorted her to tlie apartments which were especially hers. 
 
 ' I dare not disturb you longer to-night,' he said with a cer- 
 tain bitterness of tone which he could not control. ' The chil- 
 dren wished to remain up to welcome you, but I did not allow 
 them to do so ; I know how you despise undisciplined feeling.' 
 
 She laughed a little languidly, letting her women remove 
 Iier fur wrappings, wliilst slie stood in tlie delicious warmth and 
 liglit of the rdoms wlierc tliousands of hothouse roses were 
 gathered together in welcome of her retui-n, filling the hot air 
 with their fragi'ance. 
 
 ' Do you mean that for satire ? ' she said with 9, little yawn.
 
 OTHMAR. 269 
 
 ' Do not try to be sardonic, it does not suit you. The children 
 ai-e certainly much better in bed. I will go and look at them 
 after 1 have had a bath. I am very tired. Goodnight.' 
 
 She gave him a sleei:)y sign of dismissal, then chid her 
 women for being slow. Had they her pine-bath ready ? — there 
 was no bath so good after fatigue and cold. 
 
 He left her presence with pain and anger, despite the cold- 
 ness which came over him towards her : coldness born from her 
 own as the frosts of the earth come from the cold of the atmo- 
 sphere. His adoration of her had been too integral a part of his 
 life for her toiich, her voice, her glance, not to have a certain 
 empire over him wliich no other woman would ever obtain. 
 
 In the forenoon, quite late, he was again admitted to her 
 presence. She had recovered her fatigue, she was serene 
 and almost kind, but tlie children were there : they were not 
 alone five minutes. Later, she gave audience to all the great 
 fdlseurs, whose intelligence had been busied inventing marvels 
 of costume for her for the winter season. Later yet, there came 
 Some of her intimate friends and some of her most devoted 
 courtiers. 
 
 It was raining heavily in the streets, but in her apartments 
 there were hothouse heat and hothouse fragrance, in the sultry 
 air and amidst the innumerable roses it was hard to believe that 
 it was the thirtieth of November. People came and went, 
 laughed and chattered ; she wrote notes, sent messages, tele- 
 graphed many contradictory orders to her tradespeople ; the day 
 was ci'owded and entertaining ; there was a certain stimulant, 
 even for her, in the sense that she was in Paris. 
 
 Othmar did not see her again until they met at dinner. 
 Bethune dined there, and four or five other persons, who had 
 called and been invited that afternoon. The day was a type of 
 all other days of her life. 
 
 Othmar thought with impatience and bitterness of the dreams 
 he had dreamed. She despised the world and ridiculed it ; yet 
 who was more absorbed by it 1 Who was less able to live with- 
 out it '] She always spoke with her lips of the fatigue of society, 
 but, as he thought angrily, she was not so weary that she was 
 ever willing to forsake it. All the year round it was about her. 
 Every season saw her where its fashion, its pastimes, its flatteries, 
 were most largely to be found. Without that atmosphere of 
 adulation, of luxury, and of excitement she would have been 
 lost. The world was a poor aii'air, no doubt, not anything like 
 what ii might be were i>eople more inventive and more courageous. 
 She had said so a hundred times ; but still there was nothing 
 better than its movement. To read Plato all day under an oak- 
 tree, or to sit alone by a library fire with a volume of Sully 
 Prudhomme, would not be any improvement on it, though it 
 might be more philosophic.
 
 270 OTHMAR. 
 
 To his fancj', life together was poor and meaningless, unless 
 it imi^lied mutual sympathy and communion of feeling. He was 
 a romanticist, as she had always told him. To his views it was 
 not in any way an ideal of eitlier love or happiness to be for 
 ever surrounded by the fever of the great world, to be for ever 
 separated by its demands and its excitements, to meet only on 
 the common ground of mutual interests, to dwell under the 
 same roof with little more intimacy than two strangers met there 
 at a house-i:)arty. It appeared thr.t this was what she now ex- 
 pected, what she now preferred. His pride prevented him from 
 struggling against her decrees ; but he felt, and loathed to feel, 
 that he was insensibly aj^iproaching a position towards her scarcely 
 higher than that which i^apraxine had occupied. True, she 
 still had moments of exquisite charm, of irresistible sorcery, in 
 which she occasionally deigned to remember that he had been 
 the lover of her choice ; and in these she bent his will and 
 turned his brain almost as much as in the earlier years of his 
 idolatry. But these moments were rare, and Avhen they came 
 appealed to the senses in him, and not to the heart ; they left 
 him unnerved, they did not satisfy his affections. 
 
 The world had so many claims upon her : his were forgotten 
 or ignored. Where were the visions he had had of a life out of 
 the world, poetic, unworldly, tuned to another key than the 
 brazen clangour of society % They were gone for ever like last 
 year's roses. 
 
 The so-called pleasures of life had never had attraction f i ir 
 him ; they were a mere routine ; he was tired of crowds, of 
 flattery, of splendour, of movement ; he was tired of the women 
 who tried to beguile, and the men who endeavoured to use, him ; 
 the whole thing seemed to him witless, tedious, tame. She, who 
 had always declared that it was so, yet could find her diversion 
 in dazzling it and stimulating its envy ; though most things 
 failed to please her, yet, like all women, her own power pleased 
 her always ; but he had no such resource, for the power which 
 he had (that of wealth) he despised. 
 
 A sense of failure came wearily upon him during this evening 
 which followed on her return. If this were all the issue of 
 great passion and great love, what use were eitlier ? 
 
 The world was a pageant to her, and he miglit stand by and 
 see her pass in it. The role did not please him. He fancied — 
 no doubt he told himself it was but fancy — that the world 
 ridiculed him in that subordinate place, that half-effaced position, 
 that too indulgent acceptance of her continual caprices, tyrannies, 
 and slights. 
 
 He did not remember, did not know, that he himself in 
 Russia had seemed cold to her. He was only sensible of tlie 
 barrier which had grown up between them, of the indifference 
 with which his presence or his absence was regarded by her.
 
 OTHMAR. Ill 
 
 Graduiilly, as the fine mist of approaching rain steals over a 
 sunny country, dimming the colours and ettixcing the lines of it 
 little by little, until nothing is seen but the colourless blur of the 
 wide white rain itself, so the sensation of dissatisfaction, of dis- 
 appointment, of disunion had come over the tenor of their lives 
 together. The consciousness of it brought to him a profound 
 and passionate sense of irreparable loss. A word from her would 
 have dispelled it, an hour of full belief that she had ever 
 loved him as he had once loved her would have sufficed to sweej) 
 it away ; but the word was never spoken, the hour never came. 
 Time only strengthened his conviction that, were he dead before 
 her, she would not greatly care. 
 
 The sense of the incompleteness of his own life came upon 
 him with a strong consciousness as he stood in his brilliant rooms 
 with the laughter of his vrife and her guests borne to his ear, 
 and the sounds of some gay music coming to hira from another 
 salon. He might have ten, twenty, thirty, forty years more of 
 this existence, and its years, its days, its hours would always be 
 precisely like this year, this day, this hour. The future seemed 
 to rise up like a phantom and say to him, ' The past gave you 
 the fulfilment of your greatest desire. I shall give you nothing 
 but the fruit of that fulfilment. If that fruit do not content you, 
 whose fault is that? ' 
 
 Men whose wishes are thwarted can throw the blame on fate 
 if their lives prove barren ; but he had passionately wished for 
 one thing, and all the forces of life and of death had joined 
 together to give it him. He had no one to reproach, no unkind 
 destiny to upbraid, if the gift left his heart cold, his soul cheer- 
 less ; if he felt at times a mortal loneliness, and at times a 
 weariness of vague regret. 
 
 The cruelty of all great passions is that, after their fruition, 
 there must come this inevitable regret. They are altogether 
 beyond the pale of daily life ; they can never fraternise with the 
 demands of social existence. She had once said truly that death 
 is the kindest friend to love, because it saves it from being made 
 ridiculous by daily habit and worn away by daily friction. 
 
 The world is wrong when it pities Romeo, when it weeps for 
 Stradella. 
 
 The great love he had borne her had survived all those trials 
 of familiarity and of habit which are crueller enemies to love 
 than absence or than death. It had been the romantic passion 
 of Romeo united to that depth and unity of devotion which 
 Friederich Othmar had been wont slightingly to call the kniglit's 
 love for his lady. It had been so essentially interwoven with 
 his life that it had always seemed to him it could only go away 
 from him with life itself. 
 
 The idea that a love so great should yet have the same fate 
 as have all the little passions of a frivolous hour was still in-
 
 272 OTHMAR. 
 
 tolerable to liiin. Witli liim it had been of those passions which 
 ennoble and enlarge human nature, because, though interwoven 
 with the senses, they yet embrace the soul, and are drawn by 
 their very idolatry to tliat longing for immortality which is the 
 only possible apjiroach to faith in it. 
 
 But he knew that he had never moved her thus ; he knew 
 that, if ho had ever given utterance to all he felt, she would have 
 listened with a derisive compassion as to the exaggeration of a 
 niind distraught. The crystal clearness, the acute penetration, 
 the ingrained scepticism of her intellect made impossible to her 
 those illusions and those hopes which are so dear to minds more 
 imaginative tlian critical, to temperaments more impassioned 
 than logical, as was his. 
 
 He had given liis whole life away to her, and she did not 
 even care for the gift ; scarcely deigned to accept it, except in 
 conventional shape. He was unreasonable, no doubt, as she 
 would have told him had he said so to her. He had asked of 
 life and passion what neither can give — immortality. All which 
 serve to console the great majority of mankind did not avail 
 to console him for that loss. 
 
 Most men grow content with the crowd which is constantly 
 about them, with the host of petty interests which claim them, 
 witli the repetition of pleasures and pursuits which is enforced 
 on them ; their days are dull, but they are full ; they are con- 
 sumed by monotony, but they are unconscious of its tedium, 
 because they have no imagination and often no passion. 
 
 Othmar could not be thus reconciled to the disappointments 
 and the sameness of existence. He required life to be a poem, 
 and he was not consoled because it proved a mere diary. 
 
 The new year brought him without break that increase of 
 occupation which makes it a season of such weariness to all who 
 are of any importance in the world, and have a crowd of suppli- 
 cants and petitioners always looking to tliemfor support. Him- 
 self he would have liked to pass the winter season at Amyot, but 
 to her it was useless even to suggest it. 
 
 ' You cannot ask tlie world to bury itself in a frozen wood 
 by a river in flood,' she had said when once he had wished to 
 do so. 
 
 ' But is the world absolutely necessary ? ' 
 
 ' If it were not there what should we do ? You would read 
 Plato perhaps for the tliousandth time ; I could not promise to 
 read Goethe for the hundredth. The country in winter is like 
 a man of eiglity repeating a poem on spring.' 
 
 'It is just possible that the man of eighty miglit feel the 
 meaning of the poem more thoroughly than the boy of eighteen.' 
 
 ' His feelings would not prevent him from looking absurd.' 
 
 ' I suppose, you at least would never pity him \ ' 
 
 'Most surely not.' 
 
 ' What would you pity ? ' he said bitterly.
 
 OTHMAR. 273 
 
 She smiled. 'I should not pity people Avho could shut 
 themselves up in damp forests on the Loire water in mid- 
 winter. A Russian winter is quite a difierent thing ; the air 
 is like champagne, the frost is like diamonds, the plains are 
 like marble ; it is charming to have one's roses and palms in 
 a temperature of 30" Reaumur, and by merely going out of 
 doors plunge en lAdm Slbcrie. That is why I am a very 
 patriotic Russian. I love the intensity of its contrasts.' 
 
 ' As Marie Stuart loved Chastelard and Botliwell ! ' said 
 Othmar with a certain significance. 
 
 ' Should you think she loved either of them ? I should 
 doubt it. They loved her, and being stupid as men only are, 
 they compromised her.' 
 
 ' 1 dare say she thought of all men as you do ! — as a little 
 higher than the horse, a little lower than the dog ! No more ! ' 
 s.iid Othmar with some impatience. 
 
 She smiled : ' Perhaps ! I am not sure that it is a bad 
 compliment. Where should we put you in the seat of creation 
 — Mary Stuart and I — who cannot adore you as Penelope and 
 Hermione can ? ' 
 
 ' I never hoped to be adored ! ' said Othmar with some 
 bitterness. 
 
 'Oh, yes; you did, one day. All men hope for it, only 
 they do not get it, — except from Griseldis whom they beat, 
 and from Gretchen whom they forsake.' 
 
 They were alone in their drawing-room in the vacant five 
 minutes before a great dinner party. He looked at her wistfully. 
 Wliat woman was ever comparable to her, he thought ; where 
 else were that exquisite grace, that entrancing languor, that 
 supreme distinction in every movement and in every attitude ? 
 The very tones of her voice, sweet as the sound of any silver 
 boll, and cold as the breath of frost, had a charm in it that 
 no other's had. With a sudden impulse of reviving ardour he 
 stooped and pushed the loose glove from her arm, and kissed the 
 white soft skin beneath it. But she, remembering and resentful 
 of the weeks in Russia, di'ew it from his caress with her chilliest 
 rebuke : 
 
 ' My dear Otlio ! we arc neither children nor lovers ! ' 
 
 He was repulsed and silent. 
 
 At that moment their groom of the chambers announced 
 that some of their coming guests, who were of imperial name 
 and place, were entering the gates. 
 
 He and she together descended the grand staircase between 
 the lines of their servants in state liveries. 
 
 ' Together like this ! ' thought Othmar. ' Together in 
 these pageantries, these conventionalities, these mummeries ; 
 !)ut never in any other hours, in any other way !
 
 274 OTHMAR. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVT. 
 
 The days slipped one after another away, and lie had s'iil said 
 nothing to her of Damaris. He seldom saw her alone ; when 
 he did so, no opening had presented itself which seemed to him 
 propitious. The length of time which he had unwisely allowed 
 to elapse now created an additional difficulty. She might, if 
 he told her now, natui'ally ask why he had been silent so long. 
 He had made no intentional concealment ; anyone of the house- 
 hold knew that the girl had been there in the summer and 
 throughout her illness. But no one, not even her most confi- 
 dential attendants, would ever have ventured to tell their mis- 
 tress anything unasked. She held them at a distance, which 
 the boldest of them never dared to pass. The only servant she 
 had treated with more familiarity had been the little African 
 boy Mahmoud ; and Mahmoud had died, in his fifteenth year, 
 from the cruel north winds of Northern Europe, babbling in his 
 delirium to the last, in Arabic, words of his lady and his love 
 for her, poor little tropical beast ! killed as men kill the ante- 
 lope kid of the desert when they drag it from its groves of palm 
 and its warm golden sands, to shiver and perish behind the bars 
 of a cage in a northern menagerie. 
 
 Not one of the household spoke, or would ever speak, of 
 anything which ever took place unknown to their mistress ; but 
 they knew, doubtless — as servants in great cities know all the 
 affairs of their employers — that the young girl who had been ill 
 there, brought in from the streets in the bj^gone summer, was 
 dwelling at Les Hameaux, and was occasionally visited by their 
 master. Partly from their gossiping when outside his walls, and 
 partly from other causes, the name of Damaris Berarde began 
 to be bruited about in Paris. A secret is very like a subtle 
 odour ; it escapes by unseen crevices and passes to the outer air, 
 though every egress may be barred. A certain vague rumour 
 arose that not only had Rosselin discovered some new and gre:it 
 talent which he was training for the public stage, but that with 
 this hidden life which was so carefully concealed the name of 
 Othmar was connected. 
 
 Had 151anche do Laon been accused of first setting afloat that 
 breath of calumny, she would have declared, and truthfully, 
 ' Moi ? Je ib'ai jamais souijle mot ! ' 
 
 Yet she had conveyed a hint into the air, and it was sufficient. 
 One thistle-seed is enough to choke a field with thistles. 
 
 In vain do we think we walk in private paths iniscen ; some 
 eyes are forever there to peer through the thickest hedge ; some 
 lips are forever ready to say what they do not know, and magnify
 
 OTHMAR, 275 
 
 the harmless mouse-ear to a wonder-flower with a poisoned root. 
 Those of whom rumour thus discourses with bated breath and 
 comprehensive gesture are seldom or never aware that they are 
 the subject of such wliispers ; they are always the last to 
 imagine that their acts are put under the magnifying-leiises of 
 public speculation. 
 
 Even Rosselin, with his intimate knowledge of the inquisi- 
 tiveness and the loquacity of human nature, did not dream that 
 the mere fact of his going twice or thrice a week to Les Hameaux 
 and taking a neophyte to the temples of his own art, to quiet 
 morning recitations, could be a fact of any miport to the world 
 at large. He had had so many pupils, and he never remem- 
 bered that the world had had any concern with them unless 
 they had become ultimately great enough to challenge and compel 
 its languid attention ; and even then its notice bad been very 
 hard to obtain, Why should it break its rule of universal 
 apathy and indifference towards those who are obscure because 
 a young girl lived on a farm in the pastoral solitudes which had 
 once sheltered Racine ? 
 
 Both he and Othmar, in very different waj's, had a reserve 
 and hauteur of manner which always kept at arm's length rash 
 intruders and trivial questioners. Therefore they were the last 
 persons on earth to hear anything of what rumour murmured of 
 either of them. Damaris, in her simple home under the ashes 
 and elms of the Croix Blanche, was not more isolated from the 
 gossip of the world than they both were by choice and tempera- 
 ment. But tho world gossiped not the less but the more for 
 the immunity which their ignorance permitted to it, and because 
 it knew little invented much. 
 
 The world to whom Othmar's was so familiar and conspicuous 
 a name built for him a tall edifice of lies down in those innocent 
 pastures of Les Hameaux. But he was unconscious of that 
 house of fable in which they made him dwell. He believed 
 that his own abstention from any visits there made Damaris as 
 safe from notice as though she were still beneath the orange 
 leaves and olive shadows of her isle. If she wanted anything 
 or any counsel, Rosselin would tell him he felt sure. At times 
 the memory of her, as he had left her standing in the evening 
 dusk amongst the red-bi'own seeding grasses, made him desire 
 to see her with a wish he restrained. Sometimes the recollec- 
 tion of her flushed, bowed face, as he had touched her fore- 
 head with his lips, came over him with an emotion which 
 was too gentle for desire, too kind for passion ; but he rc- 
 Bisted it. 
 
 ' To see me can do her no good,' he said to himself ; ' and 
 it may make others do her harm. If she be left alone she may 
 learn to live for art : it is a safe and kindly friend.' 
 
 Une day, when he was at work in his little cabinet du travail, 
 
 t2
 
 276 OTHMAR. 
 
 his wife came to him there for a moment on her way to her 
 carriage. It was his favourite room ; it opened on one side 
 into the library, on the other into the gardens ; the peacocks 
 Avould walk in from without when the doors stood open, and 
 the green gloom of an avenue of coniferse stretched away 
 immediately in front of its steps. It was here that the sketch 
 made by Loswa hung betwixt a woodland glade painted by 
 Corot, and a sloop becalmed in the Sound painted by Aiva- 
 nofFsky. 
 
 It was rarely that Nadine deigned to enter there ; she paused 
 there now for a moment with an open note in her hand, which 
 she had received that instant from Prince Hohenlohe, request- 
 ing her intercession with Othmar concerning some matter of 
 German interest which did not brook delay. _ 
 
 It was soon disposed of. He wrote a line and gave it to 
 lier to do as she pleased with it, and looked at her with wistf ul- 
 ness. It was the first time he had seen her that day ; it was 
 four o'clock, she was about to attend a musical gathering at the 
 Prince of Lemberg's hotel in the Boulevard Josephine, con- 
 vened to hear the first execution by illustrious amateurs of a 
 pastoral cantata of his own composition on the theme of Ruth. 
 
 ' You are going to the Ruth % ' asked Othmar. 
 
 ' Yes ; I wonder you are not. Music used always to draw 
 you out of your hole like a lizard.' 
 
 ' I have a great deal to do,' he replied ; ' and, besides, how 
 many times have you not enforced on me the bourgeois absurdity 
 of accompanying you anywhere 1 ' 
 
 ' You need not accompany me. You can come by yourself. 
 Certainly I think it does look absurd to see two people always 
 together like two dogs in a coui^ling-chain.' 
 
 Othmar sighed a little impatiently. 
 
 ' Lemberg has chosen a very botirgeois theme ; surely very 
 archaic and ill adapted for his audience. The emotions of Ruth 
 will seem to your world something as ridiculous as a gown of 
 the time of Marie Am^lie ! ' 
 
 ' They are only in a pastoral,' she said with a smile. ' They 
 are very well there. "VVe are not required to share them. You 
 would share them, perhaps ; nobody else would.' 
 
 ' You mean I should share those of Boaz ! ' 
 
 ' Boaz or any other vrai berger. You should inhabit one of 
 the happy valleys of Florian and Mademoiselle Scudery. There 
 is always something in your ideas wliich is quite of the last 
 century, and seems to suggest a flock of sheei:) with ribbons and 
 a crook, like those in the Saxes statuettes. If I were to die, 
 you would like to lie on a bank of violets and mourn me in 
 alexandrines.' 
 
 He smiled, but the raillery was not welcome to liim. It 
 seemed to him that, if slie had any love for him, she would
 
 OTHMAR. 277 
 
 never laugh at him, nevci' see in him that weaker, absurder side, 
 which may be found in every human character if eyes without 
 sympathy look for it. And the imputation of sentimentality 
 irritated him as it irritates all those whose feelings are strong 
 and whose temperament is incapable of any affectation or of any 
 shallowness. 
 
 Let a man have as little vanity as he may, yet in his secret 
 heart he likes the woman he loves to find him a little more than 
 man. He had been long conscious that he would for ever look 
 in vain for this kind of admiration from her. There was a 
 certain depreciation even in her indulgence ; there was an 
 invariable criticism in her mental attitude, however favourable ; 
 she coixld be no more deceived as to the weaknesses of character 
 than a great surgeon can be as to the weaknesses of body. True, 
 her wit and her intellect served to retain her power over him, 
 but then he was nervously sensible that these made him less 
 in her eyes than he would willingly have been. He was aware 
 that the very fineness of her penetration, the very brilliancy of 
 her mind, made her infinitely more hard to please for any length 
 of time than women of smaller brain and of less highly-trained 
 powers. To a woman of rare intellect and of critical wit it is 
 difficult for any man to remain long a hero. 
 
 ' Our minds are all finite, alas ! and you want the infinite,' 
 he said once to her with some petulance, conscious that his own 
 mind did not content hers any more than any other man's. 
 
 She assented. 
 
 'I have no doubt it was always the same everywhere,' she 
 conceded. ' Probably Marcus Aurelius was very dull and fussy 
 if one knew the truth ; and I dare say even Horace is livelier 
 on paper than he was in person ! ' 
 
 As she spoke now, her eyes had wandered at the paintings 
 which were hung on the Avail behind him. He saw that they 
 rested on Loswa's sketch. He took the occasion which seemed 
 to present itself. 
 
 ' Have you ever thought of her?' he asked, turning to look 
 himself at the portrait. 
 
 ' Thought of whom ? I was thinking that Loswa has lost 
 something of his originality, of his singularity : what he has 
 produced this year is all banal.' 
 
 ' Or seems so. That is always the Nemesis which overtakes 
 a mere trick of manner ; when once it ceases to startle it 
 becomes common-place. That sketch is so admirable because it 
 is no trick : it was a genuine inspiration of the moment. Loswa 
 was never so natviral before or since.' 
 
 He spoke indifferently, but he was looking at her with con- 
 cealed anxiety. Perchance it was a propitious hour in which 
 to tell her of the fate of Damaris. 
 
 ' Do you ever think of that child 1 ' he said abruptly.
 
 278 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' Of v.'liat child ? ' she asked. 
 
 ' Of the one for whom you predicted the future of Desclee ? ' 
 he answered with a movement of his hand towards the picture. 
 
 Slie looked at the portrait with an eiibrt at recollection. 
 She had really forgotten the whole matter ; it had been such a 
 trivial incident to her, though so momentous to the other actor 
 in it. He saw that her forgotfulness was quite unfeigned. She 
 went up to the sketch and looked closely at it, drawing on one 
 of her long gloves as she did so. 
 
 ' Ah, yes ; I remember now. A little fisher-girl who in- 
 terested you, and whom you took home one night over the sea 
 in a most romantic fashion. What of her ? Has she married 
 her shijiwright ? Was it a shipwright 1 Do you want me to 
 give her some nuptial present, or a baptismal cup ? All the 
 idyls end in one's having to buy something ugly at a silver- 
 smith's ! ' 
 
 ' I told you once before she did not marry the boat-builder 
 • — the shipwright, as you call him. You made it impossible fur 
 her to do so .' 
 
 ' I did ? ' she repeated with amusement. ' You mean Loswa 
 did ; or you, perhaps ' 
 
 He grew red with anger. 
 
 ' I do not like such jests.' 
 
 ' Oh, my dear, you like no jests ! You are a knight of 
 doleful countenance and take everything au pkd de la hit re. If 
 you had had a little amourette with a fisher-girl it would arguo 
 bad taste perhaps, but it would not surprise me, except as a 
 fault in taste.' 
 
 ' Nor would it matter to you,' he said bitterly ; ' you have 
 given me my liberty so very often that, with the usual obstinate 
 ingratitude of human nature, I could have wished you less kind 
 — and less indifferent.' 
 
 'All the same, are you sure you have never taken advantage 
 of my kindness ? ' she said with amusement. If not, you must 
 be the ideal husband of that bourgeois par excellence, Dumas 
 fils. But it is a quarter-past four. Au revoir.^ 
 
 He opened the door for her in silence, and in silence escorted 
 her through the house to her carriage, and bowed low as it 
 rolled away. 
 
 His heart was bitter against her. He had been at once 
 disai^pointed and relieved at the failure of his effort. Damaris 
 tvas not even a recollection to her ; she had caused the uproot- 
 ing of the child's whole life, but she thought no more about it 
 than a person strolling through green fields thinks of some field 
 flower which he has plucked up, carried a moment in listless 
 fingers, then flung away. Her own life was humbly touchtd by 
 so many supplicants whom she jiassed, not seeing them, so 
 many whose eyes were fastened on her in envy and in wonder,
 
 OTHMAR. z-js^ 
 
 that a poor little harbarican who had been under her roof one 
 brief evening could occupy no cell of her memory. If he told 
 her the whole story she would only laugh ; call him probably 
 Scipio or Galahad. She would be sure to say something which 
 would wound him ; she \vould be sure to receive his narrative 
 with a cruel smile of doubt if not of derision. 
 
 ' Time will tell her as much as she will ever care to know,' 
 he thought with the procrastination natural to a hesitating 
 temj^er. Time would tell her, if ever her forgotten Descle'o 
 should become one of those on whom the fierce light of the 
 world's fame boat ; whilst if the life of Damaris should jiass 
 away in failure, in obscurity, in the paths of privacy, what 
 would it ever be to her 1 No more than the rain which fell, or 
 the dust which blew, in some dreary by-street which her own 
 graceful steps never approached. She had no pity for failure, 
 no sympatliy with impotence ; the unsuccessful were to her eyes 
 tlie boi'n cretins of the world. 
 
 He paused on the terrace of the house as her carriage rolled 
 on its noiseless tires through the courtyard and out of the great 
 gilded gates. 
 
 His heart was heavy, and a personal offence was in him 
 against her as he remembered her words. 
 
 What plainer hint could she have given him to pass his time 
 and take his caresses elsewhere 1 
 
 All alone though he was, his cheek grew red with anger and 
 mortification. 
 
 'What does it matter to her what I do?' he thought bitterly, 
 with a sense of mortification. ' I must be the vainest fool if !• 
 can flatter myself that, had I a hundred mistresses she would be 
 ever jealous of any one of them< Men are feeble creatures, and 
 coarse, and what they do matters nothing to her. So long as I 
 do not cross her threshold unbidden, or ruffle a rose-leaf beneath 
 lier, what does she care what I do 1 ' 
 
 As she herself passed behind her black Ukraine horses 
 through the streets, a certain vague annoyance came over her, 
 remembering his manner and his words. 
 
 He had never before been irritable as he was now. The 
 evenness of his temper had been perfect, and had allowed her 
 so great a latitude in the indulgence of her satire upon him, tliat 
 she had been led to think him weaker than he was. It was only 
 of late that he had answered her with a touch of bitterness, had 
 hinted his impatience of her criticisms, and had shown that 
 fatigue before their manner of life which he did not now aflect 
 to conceal. 
 
 'If we go on like this,' she thought, 'we shall become like 
 everybody else ; we shall not subside into friendship, but only 
 into dissension, and the world will end in observing our dis- 
 sensions, which will annoy me. His whole temper is so utterly
 
 2 So OTHMAR. 
 
 unphilosophic. He cannot undersfand and accept the inevitable. 
 He would have liked me to go and live in the centre of Asia 
 Minor and adore him : I refused to do it when it would have 
 been interesting to do. Good heavens ! Why should I do it 
 now, when I know every line of his face and every turn of his 
 character as one knows the very stones on a road one takes 
 daily 1 ' 
 
 She had been wearied by his romantic ideas and by his un- 
 practical aspirations, which suggested to her only more emmi 
 than the world, stupid as it was, aiibrded her already. Yet she 
 was irritated by her own latent consciousness that she should 
 not care to know that his dreams went elsewhere. 
 
 ' Comme cettefiUe lid trotte danslatete!' she said, half aloud, 
 with surprise and irritation. Her knowledge of men told her 
 that remembrance with them usually means attraction, tliat 
 irritation usually means some secret consciousness, some un- 
 spoken interest. 
 
 Languidly she recalled from the depths of her own memory 
 the trivial, long-forgotten incident of Damaris Berarde, whose 
 features the sketch by Loswa had preserved from oblivion. She 
 remembered how absurdly chivalrous Othmar had been that 
 evening, how coldly and sharply he had rebuked herself for her 
 negligence towards the child. 
 
 Pshaw ! how like a man it would be, she thought ; if he 
 had been attracted by a little peasant with brown hands and 
 bare feet ! 
 
 If, after all, he were just like other men, she thought ; if he 
 had a villa on the Seine, a cottage at Meudon, where he passed 
 his time when he was supposed to be closeted with the Roths- 
 child, or gone to a conference with Bleichroeder 1 Would she 
 care much ? She thought not. She would feel that half good- 
 natured disdain which a woman, passionless herself, always fee's 
 for the riotous passions of men ; but she did not think tlir.t it 
 would affect her peace of mind in any way. 
 
 If it were a woman in her own world, yes ; she would have 
 resented that. She would have felt it an offence and an 
 outrage. She would have disliked the comments of her oAvn 
 world on it ; she would have been impatient of the ridicule or 
 the compassion which it might have entailed on herself from 
 others ; and she would have been angered at the possible 
 ascendency over his intellect, and the possession of his confi- 
 dence, which such a rival would perchance have acquired to 
 her own despite. 
 
 But of what she would have called a mere vulgar liaison she 
 would have felt no jealousy, not even much surprise, for she 
 considered that men were slaves of their appetites, even when 
 they were mastei-s of their intelligence. 
 
 For the whole ways of life of a man she had that contempt
 
 OTIIMAR. 281 
 
 which a woman who reads their hearts and knows their follies 
 is apt \o entertain when to herself tlie senses say little, and 
 their gratification is indill'erent. But if it were a question of 
 the possession of his mind and thoughts by a new passion, if 
 anyone had passed before her and taken that pre-eminence in 
 his imagination which she had held so long, she became 
 irritably conscious that this would be unwelcome to her. A 
 love which reigned over his fancy, occupied his memory in 
 absence, and had empire over his will, would be an assumption 
 of her own place, would be a seizure of all that more spiritual 
 and subtle dominion which had been peculiarly her own. 
 
 She had had unbounded influence over him for ten years ; 
 she had been so certain of her influence that she had been for 
 once absurdly credulous of its duration. Though she knew 
 that passions wane like moons, yet she had never doubted in 
 her soul (whatever scepticism her lips might have declared in 
 jest) that his for her would never become less. She had never 
 truly realised that the time would come when her surpassing 
 seductions might leave him cold as one who hears a twice-told 
 tale, when his immortal passion for her might lie dead like last 
 year's leaves. 
 
 She had always piqued herself upon the wisdom with which 
 she had looked at all accidents and sentiments of life. She had 
 always believed that no weakness or instability of human nature 
 could ever take her by surprise. And yet to find thatat last she 
 had lost her sorcery for his senses and her exclusive reign over 
 his thoughts astonished her with a shock of humiliated surprise. 
 
 During the pause between the two parts into which ' Ruth ' 
 was divided, the guests of the Prince of Lemberg left the music- 
 room and strayed at their will through the other apartments of 
 his beautiful little house, which was modestly called a pavilion, 
 and stood withdrawn behind gardens and high walls of clipped 
 evergreens. It was four o'clock in the winter's day, and the 
 wh(jle of the rooms were lighted as at night ; the hundred or so 
 of people who were there represented all that was greatest in 
 fashion, with a few of those who Avere greatest in art. Belong- 
 ing, as he deemed, to both categories, Loris Loswa was amongst 
 those present. 
 
 ' Bring me some tea,' she said to him when she had seated 
 herself in a little alcove filled with bananas and palms, whose 
 green branches drooped against a background of Florentine 
 tapestries, and threw up in high relief the dead gold and dusky 
 furs of her costume. When he brought it she signed to him to 
 seat himself on a stool at her feet. He obeyed, flattered and 
 charmed. 
 
 ' Loris,' she said in a low tone to him, ' what became of the 
 subject of that sketch you made two years ago on that island in 
 the seas beyond Monaco % '
 
 2^2 OTHMAR. 
 
 Loswa reflected a moment, then he answered with perfect 
 candonr : 
 
 ' I have never thought of her from that day to this. I meant 
 to have made a great picture from that little study, but I Ifst 
 siglit of it ; I sold it.' 
 
 ' You sold it to us : yes. It is there in Otho's room. I 
 have often wondered what became of the original. Do you 
 mean tliat you have never had the curiosity to inquire?' 
 
 ' I really never have. She was certainly a provincial beauty, 
 l.ut they are not the beauties which dwell longest in my mind. 
 I intended to make .something tch cm'poii^nant of that sketch, 
 but I forgot it, once it was sold.' 
 
 ' How like a modern painter ! ' she said with amusement, 
 and changed the subject. 
 
 Lemberg approached and Loswa rose. 
 
 ' What is your verdict on my work ? ' asked the comi^oser of 
 'Ruth.' 'I am very nervous till you have spoken. When 
 they are all praising me and you are mute, I think of those lines 
 of Robert Browning's, which tell us how the musician heard all 
 tlie theatre applaud, but himse'f looked only to the place where 
 ''Rossini sat silent in his stall." ' 
 
 'If I were silent in my stall,' she replied, 'it must have 
 been because silence seemed the fittest tribute to your exquisite 
 pastoral. One seemed to hear the corn bend, the wind sigh, 
 the poppies blow. For one half hour you made me in love witli 
 
 the country ! And then the farewell to Naomi 1 only wish 
 
 that Gluck were alive to hear.' 
 
 She passed on to a discriminating criticism of the musical 
 .structure of the composition, with all that profound and scientific 
 knowledge of tlie tonic art which were united in her to the most 
 subtle appreciation of its phases. The 'Ruth' had charmed her 
 c:ir, and her mind could distinguish why it did so. 
 
 Bethune, who was near, had heard the conversation, and 
 wondered if Loswa were speaking falsely. He thought not ; he 
 felt an impulse to speak of what he had seen at Los Hameaux 
 on the day his horse was lamed, but he refrained. Rosselin had 
 invited his silence, and Rosselin was not a man of idle words, 
 nor hkely to give a caution without some good motive. 
 
 Yet he felt a sense of guilt and of complicity. He had gone 
 back twice or thrice out of a sense of courtesy, as well as of in- 
 terest, and he had learned easily, from the people of the hamlet, 
 how and through whom she had been brought thither. The 
 knowledge that it was Othmar who had placed her there had 
 struck hnn first with amazement, then with anger. 
 
 He knew none of the circumstances which had brought 
 Damaris Berarde to Paiis. She preserved an obstinate silence 
 in regard to herself, and his good breeding would not allow him 
 to i^ut direct questions to her which were evidently unwelcome
 
 OTHMAR. 2S3 
 
 ones. It Avas only in the village that he lieard the name of 
 Othmar, and the chivalrous laws which governed his actions at 
 all times did not allow him to try and learn what was withheld 
 from him. The hostility to Othmar which had for so many 
 years been so powerful a factor in his life was the strongest of 
 all reasons with him to compel him to abstain from all investiga- 
 tion, to avoid the least semblance of inquisitiveness as to his 
 conduct. But in the absence of knowledge he placed the natural 
 construction of a man of the world on the little lie knew, and 
 the facts of her altered abode and manner of life, and he was 
 angered against the man who could, as he thought, change for 
 new amours the passion which he had given to his wife. 
 
 Of the faults of that temperament which left Othmar's un- 
 satisfied and repelled, Bethune was too loyal a lover to see any- 
 thing. Her very defects had always seemed beauties in his 
 eyes. To desert such a woman as she was for even so lovely a 
 child as Damaris seemed to him intolerably unworthy ; and the 
 secret conduct of such a connection seemed to him at once com- 
 monplace and coarse. He had always done justice to the rarity 
 and delicacy of many qualities in his successful rival, and the 
 discovery of what he supposed to be a mere intrigue in his daily 
 life surprised and disgusted him. When he heard Nudege now 
 speak of Damaris Berarde he felt indignantly grieved for her 
 deception, as men are always inclined to grieve for a woman 
 who interests them before an infidelity which is not their own. 
 
 ' AYho would have believed that even she would fail to 
 secui'e constancy % ' he thought as he watched the light play 
 upon the rings upon her hand as she gave back her cuj) to 
 Loswa. 
 
 ' You look interested in my inquiries,' said Nadine, observ- 
 ing his countenance with amusement. ' Is it possible that you 
 followed up that idyl on an island of which I let you read the 
 first chapter ? ' 
 
 ' No, indeed,' said Bethune in haste, with a certain em- 
 barrassment which did not escape her observation. 
 
 'My dear friend, it would not be a crime if you did,' she 
 said with a smile. * Considering how many men saw that hand- 
 some child in my rooms, I know very little of human nature if 
 some one at least of them did not return to the isle to write an 
 epilogue to 'Esther.' Loris denies that he has done so. To be 
 sure, men always deny that sort of accusation. But for once 
 lie looks innocent.' 
 
 ' You never heard anything of her % ' asked Bethune, con- 
 scious that he did not speak wholly at his ease. 
 
 ' What should one hear ? I dare say she has shut up her 
 play-books and eaten her bridal bonbons by this. I remember 
 she was quite stupid ^^hen one saw her close ; slic kept blink- 
 ing in the light of my dancing-rooms like a little owl out at
 
 284 OTHMAR. 
 
 noonday. If she had had any real talent mere upholstery would 
 not have had any power to strike her dumb.' 
 
 'Probably it was not the upholstery. You have struck 
 dumb greater persons than she.' 
 
 ' When I have desired to do so. But with her I do not 
 remember that I desired it. I desired only to be kind to her. 
 I have always wished to discover genius n some obscure 
 creature.' 
 
 'They say Rosselin has discovered one,' said Paul of 
 Lemberg. ' Then you will say, it is his trade.' 
 
 ' Who is it ? ' 
 
 ' Ah, that I know not. Some woman or child who is to 
 revive all the last glories of the French stage. Some one kept 
 in perfect obscurity hitherto, as bird-trainers keep their piping 
 bullfinches in the dark all day long.' 
 
 He spoke with no second thought, knowing nothing more 
 than that which he said. But Bethune, silently listening, felt 
 again an uneasy sense as of some guilty complicity in what he 
 witliheld 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 tlie 
 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 for- 
 gotten 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, " 0, 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 some- 
 thing 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 sove- 
 reigns bid their courtiers take theirs ; but evil betides the 
 courtier who is rash enough to construe the bidding literally.
 
 OTHMAR. 285 
 
 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. AVhenever 
 slie 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 Nadege 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 'wne foirt jxmr la soif,' after the wise in- 
 junction of the provincial proverb. 
 
 She had never hitherto used the services of Michel Obreno- 
 vitch for any wrongful cause ; but she knew that, to whatever 
 purpose she chose to dedicate him, to that purpose he would bo 
 bound. 
 
 When she rose in the following forenoon she sent for him, 
 and gave him the name of Damaris Berarde 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 fath, 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
 
 286 OTHMAR. 
 
 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 niiglit 
 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 
 jiressure 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 
 Avhilst all Paris looked on him as one of the most enviable of 
 its great personages, he himself would willingly have given all 
 liis 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 Wei-ter, 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. 
 
 Tlicrefore, in the press of great interests and of public mat- 
 ters, which despite himself absorbed so much of his thouglits 
 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 im- 
 pnilses 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 or.'inge trees and the sea-waves, restore to 
 her licr beautiful free open-air existence amongst the sea- 
 swallows and the olive-haunting thrushes. He woidd have 
 striven to do :t at all cost ; but the isle was not to be bonglit.
 
 OTHMAR. 2 87 
 
 The OAvner believed it to be a mountain of treasure, since it was 
 sought for, and Avould 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. 
 
 Tliis day when he had watched liis 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 wliich goes west on its way to the 
 sea-shores of Bre'tagne. 
 
 ' Poor child,' he thought. ' Fear of them makes me a 
 coward to her. She must have deemed me unkind and neglect- 
 ful ; 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 doAvncast face which jMillet 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 mused. 
 ' We must have blundered horribly. Or is it the weather which 
 is more at fault than we ? In the soutli, pastoral life is still 
 enjoyable and still graceful.' 
 
 He spoke to the woodman and got only sullen monosyllablerj 
 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,' ho 
 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 quicklj', 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
 
 2S8 OTHMAR. 
 
 thrown backward ; her eyes were lookino; 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 w^as 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 botli 
 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 afiected 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 enthiisiam, 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 Avaking. 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. 
 'J'o her he had been truly a ministering angel. Slie 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.
 
 OTHMAR. 2 89 
 
 * May we go into the house % ' he asked. He remembered 
 Blanche de Laon. 
 
 ' Yes,' she answered ; her voice was tremulous with emotion, 
 and liad 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 % ' 
 
 (-Jthmar did not look at her as he replied : 
 
 ' xMy 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 
 niy 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 Avith an 
 etibrt. 
 
 ' 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 difierence between himself and her ; of 
 the fact that, tliough 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 tlie Avorld'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 liis wife had come 
 to her : of that great lady who had tempted her, ridiculed her, 
 forgotten hei', and been her fate. 
 
 Where was she ? 
 
 What did she know of herself 1 
 
 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
 
 290 OTHMAR. 
 
 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 : 
 
 ' AVhy 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 tlie 
 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 lie 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 snow- 
 drops in a glass Avhich 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 
 Avere 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 Bias 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 coiisciousness 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 Avould do. To her as to 
 the world, if ever either became aware of this home wliicli he 
 liad made for another woman under the ash-trees of Les 
 Hameaux, he could only seem the protector of Damaris in a 
 \ cry ditlerent sense to that in whicli he actually was so. The
 
 OTHMAR. 291 
 
 certainty of sucli inevitable judgment oppressed him, and 
 obscured to him the beauty of the girl's face, the lovely fresh- 
 ness and fervour of her welcome. 
 
 The one great love of his life had been so long his only pre- 
 occupation, 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 Avhich was 
 present to his own heart and mind, that such infidelity might 
 perchance become possible to him, hnmiliated 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 
 Avith 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 slie felt ; but now that he 
 was there before her, she was mute. The colour came and 
 Avent 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 ! 
 
 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, de- 
 lightful, instinctive happiness in the mere sense of sentient 
 
 u2
 
 292 OTHMAR. 
 
 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 Bethune has been here twice or 
 three times.' 
 
 ' Bethune ! ' echoed Othmar with astonishment and some dis- 
 pleasure. ' 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 
 (lid not dissimulate. 'Do he and his flowers please you ? ' he 
 ; sked, 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 
 i.s kind, and M. Rosselin says he is good. He is a great friend 
 of hers, is he not % ' 
 
 ' Of my wife's ? ' said Othni.ar, with irritation. ' Yes. She 
 Lkes 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 
 BJthune ; the intimacy which his wife allowed him, although 
 only, he knew, in accordance with the habits and usages of a 
 w<niian of the world, yet was always more intimate than he 
 cared to see. He knew the solidity and nobility of Bethune's 
 character and the hopeless devotion wliich had so long absorbed 
 his heart, but sometimes he tliought 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 
 liad otiered her his hand after it. He had said little against 
 if, because he had known how absiu-d and vulgar a passion 
 jealousy had always seemed in her sight, but there had never 
 bien any cordiality of intercourse between himself and 
 P.i'thune, and it irritated him to hear that Bethune 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 Blauclie 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. Tlie Due was a n.an of
 
 OTHMAR. 203 
 
 chivalrous honour and fastidious delicacy ; he would in all 
 likelihood feel bound to respect a seci^et which lie had acci- 
 dentally suppressed, but the influence of Nadege was unbounded 
 witli him, and if by any chance through the malice of Blanchette, 
 or any otiier means, her suspicions should be in any way aroused, 
 she would turn the mind of Bothune inside out as easily as a 
 child can empty a bird's nest. He knew her great power over 
 men, and the tenacity with wliich 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 embarrass- 
 ment. ' Have you mentioned me to him '? ' 
 
 ' Oh no ! ' — the colour flushed into her face, there was indig- 
 nation in her denial. ' Do you think that 1 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 com- 
 panion did not. 
 
 The admiration and loyalty with which her visitor had 
 spoken of a lady Avho 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 tlieir 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 owu 
 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 ould 
 understand that a woman or a man should die for love, or sliould 
 in an hour of hatre:l 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 
 wei-e 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 inter- 
 pretation, and infidelity had often been roughly chastised by a 
 blow of the knife, or the scourge of a roj)e's end. All the refined
 
 294 OTIIMAR. 
 
 gradations of inconstancy in the great world were wholly unim- 
 aginable 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 
 INIarie 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 
 tlie Duchesse de Septmonts throws the cup down so violently in 
 " L'Etrangere," 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 
 wliich the character of his wife exercised over her : 
 
 ' Why has she so much power over people 1 ' she asked in a 
 low voice. 
 
 ' My wife 1 ' asked Othmar, who was absorbed in his own 
 tlioughts. ' 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- 
 BcHers a kind of union of labour, which is called marriage, and 
 which makes the woman toil all day for her children and her 
 hou.sc, and grow grey on one hearthstone, and live out her life 
 with the sun shining on one narrow field. You do not under- 
 st md tliat when a great lady docs a man the honour to accept 
 his h:ind in marriage, she retains her own complete immunity
 
 OTHMAR. 295 
 
 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 ofTence 
 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 remem- 
 brance 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 Be'rarde. 
 
 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 liim 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
 
 296 OTHMAR. 
 
 cold hospitality of a heart whicli lias been swept empty by 
 another woman % ' 
 
 He looked at her where she stood, with the grey liglit of (li3 
 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. Tlie shining curls, tlie luminous eyes, the mouth like the 
 bud of the pomegi-anate, 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 trij)le 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 ofl"er 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 Avas angered 
 Avith 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 liad 
 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 tlionght, and since the ambition 
 of it is so strong in you, it is no doubt best that you sliould 
 give it an undivided devotion. We do nothing well that we do 
 half-hcartedl3%' 
 
 ' Docs ho tell you what he thinks of me?' she asked, still 
 timidly. 
 
 ' liosselin ? ' said Otlnuar. ' Yes ; he thinks greatly of your
 
 OTHMAR. 297 
 
 natural gifts ; you content him, wliich is a rare thing, for he is 
 hard to please ; he believes you may move that dull, stupid, 
 imitative mass which calls itself the worlil. 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 w4th every advantage, will enable you to begin 
 where others only arrive after long years of toil and of proba- 
 tion : 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 T wished'? Could I not make 
 Paris crown me once, even if I gave the crown back to them ? 
 Why not ? ' 
 
 ' Because, drinking once, every on? drinks as long as a drcp 
 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 under- 
 stand ' 
 
 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 slatted and himself coloured ut 
 the menace which there was in the sound of her voice. 
 
 ' You mean Nadege 1 ' 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, wliich 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
 
 298 OTHMAR. 
 
 o:ie tiling -vvliich commands lier respect : if you sliow her you 
 possess it she Avill 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 Berardes 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 thinlv 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 
 washed. 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 do^vn from the wood-fire, and the shadows of 
 the twilight were upon her face. Her open-air, bird-like, 
 Hower-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 Avhose dis(|uietude and disillusion the learned 
 played as with knotted threads which it amused them to dis- 
 entangle, but before whose impenetrable secret the simple broke 
 their heart. 
 
 Othmar continued with an effort, leaning against the side of 
 the shut casement grown dark with the descending gloom of 
 coining night. 
 
 ' I cannot make you comprehend, my dear, with how gi-eat 
 a pa.ssion 1 have loved her. You may have heard of one who 
 bore my name before her, one who clied on your own shores. 
 She was lovely in body and soul, and had no fault that ever I
 
 OTHMAR. 299 
 
 saw, and would have died for me — did die for me, perchance — 
 and to her I was without any love, alvvays because my whole 
 soul was set upon another woman. And that other is now my 
 wife. And her, I tell you, I have loved in such wise that I 
 believe no other love worthy the name will ever arise in me 
 again. 1 do not say that it is impossible, for no man knows ; — 
 but so I think. She has disdained the place she took, and has 
 left it empty, but no other can fill it after her. She has made 
 that impossible ' 
 
 The tears rose to his eyes as he spoke. He could not think 
 of the woman he had worshipped, and whose heart he thought 
 had never had one pulse of actual love for him, without a pain 
 which overmastered liim. He had never spoken of all he felt 
 for her to any living being throughout the years in which her 
 influence had reigned over his life. 
 
 Damaris looked at him in the deepening shadows which hid 
 her own face. A passionate pain communicated itself to her as 
 she listened. 
 
 ' Is it she who does not care, then % ' she asked. Her voice 
 was hurried and had a tremor in it. 
 
 ' God knows ! ' said Othmar. ' No ; I think she does not.' 
 
 He sighed wearily ; his reserve once broken through, it Avas 
 a kind of solace to him to speak out aloud the disappointment 
 mute for so long, for so long unconfessed even to himself. 
 
 ' It is not her fault,' he continued; 'nature made her so. 
 We all seem to her weak and sensual fools. Her own mind is 
 so cultured and so hypercritical that men far gi-eater than I am 
 would seem to her poor ci-catures. She needed a Caesar to share 
 his empire with her, and she would have laughed even at him 
 because his laurels could not have covered his scanty locks ! 
 She would have always seen his baldness, never his greatness. 
 She is made like that. She does not care ; why should she % 
 ^^'c care for her. But that is no reason. Perhaps she would 
 regret it if the children she has had by me died, but if I died 
 to-uiorrovv I doubt if the world would look dark to her. It 
 certainly would not look empty ! ' 
 
 He spoke bitterly, with truth and irony so intermingled in 
 his unconsidered words, that it was far beyond the powers of 
 his inexperienced hearer to distinguish between them ; all she 
 felt was that he was unhappy, yet that his soul was set irrevocably 
 upon this woman who had wedded him only to torment, to 
 elude, to disappoint, to humiliate him. 
 
 She did not know enough of men and women and their 
 passions to understand all that he meant in all its fulness of 
 mortification, but she could understand that he sufiered with a 
 kind of suffering for which it was impossible for anyone to 
 console him, and which severed him from herself by a vast and 
 cruel distance of which she became suddenly sensible as she had
 
 3(30 OTHMAR. 
 
 never been before. His presence was sweet to her with a 
 sweetness which was akin to anguisli ; the sound of his voice 
 thrilled through all her being, the touch of his hand was a 
 magnetism over her, charming her to a sense of ecstasy in whicli 
 she lost all power of will : but she was powerless to banish for 
 an hour the remembrance of this other woman, she had no 
 sorceiy which could undo and replace the magic of the past ; 
 she did not think this or feel this because her thoughts and her 
 feelings were all confused and inarticulate, but it was so, and 
 an immense consciousness of loneliness and impotency weighed 
 like lead upon the warmth and the buoyancy of her soul. 
 
 She was nothing to him. 
 
 They were alike silent, standing in the dusky windows with 
 the cold dark country in its wintry silences stretched without. 
 
 ' It is best she should know ! ' he thought with a sense of 
 cruelty and ingratitude. It seemed to him terrible that she 
 should waste all the treasures of her lovely youth, of her fresh 
 emotions, of her original thoughts, of her awaking passions, 
 upon one who could not give her even one single heart's beat of 
 love in answer. He stooped and kissed her on her shining 
 curls. 
 
 ' Good-night, my child,' he said with jjitying tenderness. 
 * Good-night. Think of me as your friend, always your friend, 
 and if you see me seldom believe that it is not due to want of 
 sympathy, but only because — because ' 
 
 He paused, seeking for words which could render his meaning 
 clear to her without wounding her by too plain and blunt a 
 Avarning against her own heart. 
 
 ' Because I meet you too late to be able to care for you,' he 
 thought ; ' because I have nothing to give you worth your 
 dreams and your youth ; because I would give you more if I 
 could, but I cannot ; because my heart is like a shut grave, it is 
 too full of its own dead to be able to let in the living ! ' 
 
 But he could not say this, it would have been too harsh ; so 
 he said nothing. He kissed her once more on her soft thick 
 hair gently and coldly, and left her, while the darkness of the 
 night gathered around her, and over the silent fields the last 
 snow of the winter began to fall, drifting noiselessly before a 
 northern wind. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 That night he received a letter from Melville, written in answer 
 to the one in ■which he liad told him the story of Damaris. 
 Melville was far away in Asia at a Jesuit mission station in the
 
 OTHMAR. V>l 
 
 Bnowy mountains, and his reply had taken many months to 
 cross the Chinese plains and seas. 
 
 ' What you tell me,' he wrote, ' of a child whom I knew so 
 l;appy on her little island has startled and does distress me 
 greatly. Was it any other than yourself who were her friend, 
 1 should be not only distressed but very apprehensive. She is 
 of that ardent, impetuous, imaginative temperament which can 
 be led to any madness if misled by its dreamsorby its affections. 
 1 shall for ever blame myself that I did not see her before my 
 departure for Asia. But I left the South of France for Rome 
 very hurriedly, and thence came at once to these strange lands 
 to examine and report on the state of all the Catholic missions 
 of the far East to the Vatican. I had not a moment for any 
 personal memories or personal farewells. 
 
 ' I would that I were in Europe, but it will be impossible for 
 me to execute my errand under another year. You will do, I 
 know, all that is chivalrous and generous by her, but what I 
 fear is that thus doing it you will inevitably become the angel 
 rnd ideal of her poetic fancy. Let me urge on you to see her 
 yourself as little as is consistent with necessity and common 
 i.indne.ss, and to have her as much as possible occupied by in- 
 tellectual pursuits and interests. You will not be offended with 
 me that I say tlius much. The vulgar successes of such easy 
 Fcduction will have no attraction for you, and I am sure that the 
 share which your wife originally had in tlius bringing about her 
 misfortunes will make this child altogether sacred to you, 
 
 ' The dramatic art may be the only career, as you say, which 
 is open to her. I remembei- that she was for ever reading plays 
 and poems, and could recite her favourite passages with pathos 
 and with fire. It is not what one would choose for her, but if 
 she enter upon it, it may occupy her and save her from herself. 
 I have no churchman's prejudice against that or any art. My 
 time, when in Paris, has been largely spent amongst great 
 artists, and I have found in them many great qualities of the 
 mind and heart which might go far to balance before any judge 
 the freedom and the passions of their unconventional lives. I 
 liclieve the character of Damaris to be in every way that of an 
 artist. That resistance to all inherited destiny, and to all 
 liabitual suiToundings, always marks out the one who is born to 
 separate himself or herself from the common herd, and she had 
 this very strongly. Hardy, and loving all country things and 
 seafaring ways, as she did, there was yet always in her some- 
 thing which was unlike her destiny, something restless, daring, 
 and dreamful, something which, wherever it is found, presages 
 woe or fame. She has at all times attracted me greatly, for 
 from her earliest years she has had that about her which suggests 
 the possession of genius, and there is in her that union of the 
 peasant and the patrician which has before now made the most
 
 302 OTHMAR. 
 
 original, and most psycliologically interesting, characters on the 
 earth. Tell me more and at once of what you expect from her 
 future, if she be not, indeed, as yet too young for its horoscope 
 to be securely cast. I will write to her direct. Meantime re- 
 ceive my thanks for all that j'ou have already done to save tliis 
 poor sea- gull astray in a city, and believe in my respect and 
 esteem. Of course you have told Madame Nadege ; what does 
 she say % ' 
 
 Othmar read the letter sitting in the solitude of his library 
 in the small hours of the waning night ; and a pang, which was 
 almost that of conscience, smote him as he did thus read. He 
 had done nothing indeed to forfeit the esteem of the writer ; 
 nothing which made him unworthy of the writer's contidence ; 
 yet a vague sense that he had been unwise in all wliich Le had 
 meant for kindness, and wrong in the reticence which had sprung 
 from his own selfish sensitiveness, oppressed him with a useless 
 self-reproach. How could he tell Melville that his wife knew 
 nothing of the presence of Damaris Berarde at Chevreuse, 
 without appearing to him to have become that mere vulgar 
 seducer which Melville would have thought it the grossest of 
 insults to suppose him ^ 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 The next day Othmar called upon Rosselin, and without preface 
 said to him abruptly : 
 
 ' You had better tell the Due de Bethune all I have told you 
 about your pupil. I do not know whether he will believe it or 
 not, but it is wholly intolerable for us to allow him to suppose, 
 as he may sujipose from appearances, that there are relations 
 between myself and her which have no existence in fact.' 
 
 Rosselin listened and made no reply. 
 
 Othmar continued with impatience. 
 
 ' I do not know what ho thinks, but he j^robably thinks 
 something entirely and grossly unjust to her. He is a man of 
 honour : he will respect confidence if it be placed in him.' 
 
 ' Why not tell him yourself \ He is, I believe, very intimate 
 in your houses.' 
 
 ' He is no especial friend of mine. He is often at my 
 house, it is true, but personally I have no intimacy Avith him 
 whatever.' 
 
 Rosselin hesitated ; then he summoned his courage and said 
 frankly : 
 
 ' Pardon me, but it is not the Due de Bethune or any other 
 man who has any concern with the position Avhich you have
 
 O Til MAR. 303 
 
 created for yourself and for my pupil ; the only person for whom 
 it can have any vital interest, or who can exercise any influence 
 over it, is the Countess Othmar, to whom you will not speak 
 of it.' 
 
 Othmar coloured ; he was greatly annoyed. He was conscious 
 also that Rosselin was right in what he said. 
 
 ' If my wife heard of her from others, I would tell her how 
 she came there,' he said, with some embarrassment. 'But I 
 can assure you that though M. de Bethune might believe in the 
 facts as you know them, she would not do so. She never be- 
 lieves in any single motives. She would suppose that I tried to 
 gloss over with sentiment a mere vulgar amour.' 
 
 ' Men's natures,' he added, bitterly, 'are often as simple, and 
 straight, and frank as a 'dog's, because, like dogs, we are stupid 
 and trustful ; but the mind of a woman of culture is far too 
 critical in its survey and too intricate in its own motives 
 ever to accredit us with the intellectual honesty we possess. It 
 is a quality so stupid that it seems to women as incredible as it is 
 uninteresting.' 
 
 Rosselin grew in his turn impatient. 
 
 ' You, too, appear to me,' he said bluntly, ' to be too fond of 
 Pascal's esprit de finesse, jugement dc sentimeni. Intellectual 
 analysis is very interesting no doubt, but I never knew it serve 
 in the least to solve the prosaic difficulties of active life. You 
 cannot govern circumstances with theories.' 
 
 In himself he thought : 
 
 ' You create a position in the frankness of your generosity 
 which you jaei^ceive becomes equivocal in its aspect to others ; 
 you earnestly desire to prevent its appenringso ; yet you do not 
 take the one measure which Avould secure to it immimity from 
 suspicion.' 
 
 ' 1 have an idea,' he continued aloud, ' that the best way to 
 test her talents and prepare the world for the appreciation of 
 them, would be for her to recite at some great house, to be seen 
 and heard by some choice audience. Why not in yours 1 Why 
 not to your friends 1 ' 
 
 ' In mine 1 To my acquaintances 1 ' 
 
 'Why not? It is, in my opinion, the easiest and most 
 propitious way in which a beginner can try her powers. It is 
 less alarming than a public stage, and the verdict given is more 
 discriminating, and of greater value afterwards. The majority 
 of neophytes have no such chance possible. They may go where 
 they can ; begin in the provinces ; take anything they can get. 
 But when it can be done, there is no question but that to make 
 an entry into the world in the best society is an immeasurable 
 benefit to any aspirant. It is to be famous at once if successful ; 
 whilst, if unsuccessful, the failure is passed over as the caprice 
 of the host in whose house the ne<iphyte is tried. As you ard
 
 304 GTHMAR. 
 
 disposed to do anything for her, it seems to me that it would 
 cost you little to ask Madame Nadege to permit the representa- 
 tion of some saynete, or some short piece like the " Luthier de 
 Cremone," at one of her great winter entertainments. She 
 likes novelty ; and I believe she often has dramatic representa- 
 tions both in Paris and at Amyot.' 
 
 ' She has them, certainly,' said Othmar with some constraint. 
 
 Rosselin looked from under his eyelids at him. 
 
 ' Then what objection is there ? You have said that Madame 
 your wife, first of all of us, saw something like genius in Damaris 
 Berarde. She would not refuse to allow her prophecy to be 
 proved true under her own auspices.' 
 
 'No ; I do not suppose that she would refuse.' 
 
 'If you would disUke that she should be asked, that is 
 another matter,' said Rosselin with some impatience, whilst to 
 liiinself he thought, ' You have made a secret of this thing, 
 and you find what a burdensome and stupid thing a secret is, 
 espjBcially when it is one that circumstances are certain to take 
 out of our hands, whether we will or no.' 
 
 'I have no dislike to your project,' replied Othmar with 
 hesitation ; 'but,' he added more frankly, 'I must tell you tliat 
 my wife is not in the least likely to take interest twice in the 
 same person ; and I must also tell you, as I did some months 
 ago, that she knows nothing of the present existence of your 
 pupil. If you like to tell her, do so ; I give you free per- 
 
 mission.' 
 
 ' I ? ' echoed Rosselin. ' My dear friend, if such a great 
 lady saw a superannuated old actor enter her presence she 
 would surely order her lackeys to turn him out unheard. I 
 never spoke to Madame Nadege in my life, though rumour has 
 made me feel well acquainted with her.' 
 
 ' She always treats genius with respect. It is, perhaps, the 
 only thing she does respect ' 
 
 ' Are you sure she does not think it escaped from Bicetre ? 
 Most firaudes dames do.' 
 
 ' No ; she has too much intellect lierself. She is a (jrande 
 dmne, but she is much more besides. She admires talent 
 wliercver she finds it ; only she thinks that she finds very 
 little.' 
 
 ' There she is riglit enough ; there is any quantity of mere 
 facility, of mere imitativeness, in our time, but there is very 
 little which deserves a higher name.' 
 
 ' And you believe that Damaris Berarde has more than mere 
 talent ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, I believe it. I may be wrong, but I have never been 
 wrong in such judgments, though it seems pretentious to say so. 
 It is because 1 believe that she has this, that I am anxious for 
 the world to first hear of her in such a way that she may be
 
 OTHMAR. 305 
 
 bparecl the vulgar and tedious novitiate which is generally un- 
 ftvoidable before a dramatic career ; and also I should like to 
 cpmmand for her such an audience as may become a title of 
 nonour to her, and a protection against false tongues. It is 
 inevitable that your name has been, or will be, associated with 
 Jiers. Modern life is one huge glass-house. If she be first seen 
 at your house, in your salons, calumny can scarcely attach to 
 your friendship for her. Pardon me if I speak with too intimate 
 a candour. If I said less, I should feel myself almost dragged 
 into the base collusion of a Sir Pandarus.' 
 
 Othmar grew pale with anger ; he was unaccustomed to 
 familiarity, and the words seemed to him wanting in delicac^i 
 and in respect. 
 
 ' You are very hopeful ! ' he said bitterly, ' and wonderfully 
 trustful, my good friend, if you imagine that in the world we 
 live in she would be secured from slander by being seen in my 
 drawing-rooms. The only thing they would say, if they were 
 in the mood to say anything, would be that I deceived my wife 
 into facilitating my amours. Society is not so easily persuaded 
 of innocence as you appear to think, whilst it is thoroughly per- 
 suaded of the Countess Othmar's indifiei'ence to myself ! ' 
 
 In the impulse of his anger he said what he would not have 
 said in a cooler moment. He was greatly irritated at all which 
 was implied in Rosselin's latest words, and the allusion to 
 his wife's indifference to his actions escaped him almost in- 
 voluntarily. 
 
 ' I regret if I offend you,' said Rosselin, whose keen eyes 
 read his feelings in his face. ' I say what it seems right to me 
 to say. I know the world has always mauvaise langue, 1 know 
 it as well as you can do, but there are limits to its impudence. 
 I do not believe that the lowest knave of it all would ever dare 
 to say that you passed any insult on your wife. It has been too 
 well aware of your devotion to her. However, let us abandon 
 my idea. We can find some other way, perhaps ; the prepara- 
 tion I have given my pupil has been short, and perhaps im- 
 mature. She can wait awhile without injury. You have said, 
 I think, that she has means enough of her own to live on as she 
 lives now 1 ' 
 
 ' She has means enough. Yes.' 
 
 ' Without wasting her little substance ? I suppose her 
 grandfather did not leave her much ? ' 
 
 ' She has quite sufficient income for her wants ; I believe 
 they are very simj^le.' 
 
 He spoke impatiently and rose. Rosselin, whose tact was 
 always of the acutest kind, understood the hint and changed 
 the subject. 
 
 Left to himself, the anger of Othmar soon grew less, and the
 
 3o6 OTHMAR. 
 
 courtesy of liis nature made him regret his impatience with a 
 man double his years aud not his equal in station ; one, more- 
 over, who had only spoken honestly thoughts which were 
 blameless. 
 
 The suggestion had annoyed him both by what it asked, 
 which seemed to him dilHcult, 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 apjieal, and had aided him in regard to 
 Damaris with a sympathy the more noteworthy because it had 
 at iirst 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 
 {.nd my high esteem.' 
 
 He signed the few lines, and sent them by a messenger to 
 Asnieres. 
 
 When Rosselin received them he was sitting by his solitary 
 lam J) 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 indiflerence. What could he ex- 
 pect ? 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 Vive 
 for him 1 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 XH. 
 
 A "WEEK or two later he saw Othmar again enter hia little par- 
 lour. Othmar made ministers wait on him, and would keej) 
 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, 
 wliicli tlic world hated as it would never have hated any vices 
 in which he might have chosen to indulge.
 
 OTHMAR. 307 
 
 * I have come to speak to you of your wishes, which I perhaps 
 dismissed too hastilj^' he said, as he seated himself. 'You 
 really believe that to be first seen and heard, as you proposed, 
 would benefit youv 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 Berarde. 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 hourgeoise. She 
 is a declasse : you have said it yourself. There are two asylums 
 possible for a declasse : they are Pleasure and Art. I prefer the 
 latter.' 
 
 ' Art is quite cruel enough. She will never be able to go 
 back into i^rivacy. 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 Danae'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 un- 
 spoken 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 sufi"rages. But wliat 
 else can be done with her 1 What else 1 You would not hear 
 of a conventional marriage for her and a house in the suburbs, 
 and I suppose she w-ould not hear of it either. She is half a 
 poetj half a thing of the open air like a doe or a swallow. You 
 
 X.2
 
 5c8 or H MAR. 
 
 cannot send her back whence she came. If you could do it ni 
 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 break- 
 ing up of the hapi^y 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 
 liandsome 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 Berarde 
 and the world together. 
 
 ' Why does he dislike a public career for her so much 1 ' 
 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 fif 
 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 hs rendrcs ticdes d'un feii 
 eteint, 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 
 Valliere, I should have said to her, "Remain in the crowds of 
 Versailles if you wish to forget : do not go into solitude." No 
 Avoman forgets who has no one to teach her forgetfulness. Soli- 
 tude 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 tliat he had resigned the direction of 
 her life into Rosscliu's hands, and had no right to di'^putc with
 
 OTHMAR. 309 
 
 her guide the course which he deemed most desirable for her. 
 lie had sought the counsels and the assistance of a man of 
 '^^ nius 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 wei'e 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 vho had 
 oti'cred 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 idohitrous, 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 nntrained 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 domi- 
 nant 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 JNIoditerranean suns ; all these were combined 
 t()gether 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 1 Not even, as Rossclin had thought, 
 lr& cendres tiedes d^'imfen eteint. 
 
 He had wider thought and bolder judgment than the timid
 
 3IO OTHMAR. 
 
 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 con- 
 sidered that he sacrificed her to himself if he had kept her in 
 eternal isolation. 
 
 Great natures and great affections do not need the com- 
 panionship 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. 
 
 Mea 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 
 aflections, 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 wiU 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 Avoman who, 
 despite the enemy Time, and the decaying worm of custom, had 
 still, through her very mutability, cruelty, and negligence, 
 retained a powei 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 indiff"erence now spread itself to his own 
 emotions, and he felt life, as it were, grow cold and wintry 
 around him, memoiy was there to tell him of the sorceries of 
 the past, and even love Avas still there, which watched her wist- 
 fully, and would still have obeyed her sign had she made one. 
 
 What then had he to give Daanaris 1 
 
 Nothing which was woithy 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 liim : she was hia
 
 OTHMAR. 311 
 
 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. 
 
 Oircmnstance being then as it was between them, and power- 
 less as he was to feel for her anything more than the tentlerness 
 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 ofier 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 inter- 
 fere 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 
 u'^t 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 arrange- 
 ments for it in your hands. You can then bring forward 
 Damaris Berarde 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 slie will certainly never do so.' 
 
 ' She will not fail,' said Rosselin ; whilst he thought to him- 
 self, ' 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 
 wliich I used to be able to communicate to others.' 
 
 Rosselin was a man of warm feelings and keen sympathies, 
 but the ai'tist in him dominated the friend. He was so satu- 
 rated 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 
 (juestion 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
 
 312 OTHMAR. 
 
 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 re- 
 sources 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 fascina- 
 tinn for her as strong as hatred, and irresistible as magnetism. 
 It was an electric force which he could not afibrd 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 throw- 
 away genius on one human life is to take a planet out of the 
 skies and buiy it like a diamond between two human breasts.' 
 
 It was in jiursuance of the same belief in what was best for 
 her which had made him wish her the heart of Rachel, not the 
 heart of Desclee. 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, wouhl 
 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 witli her, found Damaris feverish, restless and 
 despondent. She had lost, for the time at least, that buoyancy 
 and enthusiasm whicli were the most prominent qualities of her 
 nature ; she seemed to hini listless and taciturn^ her eves had ^
 
 OTHMAR. zn 
 
 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 impa- 
 tiently. ' 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 nnderstand is that his wife cares for him so 
 little And yet, why should I say so? All the world over one 
 sees familiarity bring indifl'erence, security create neglect.' 
 
 Aloud he said, with anger to her : 
 
 ' What has come to you ? If you do not mean to become an 
 artist, and a great artist, adieu ! My hours are not likely to be 
 so many on earth that I can afford to waste them. What ails 
 you \ Your voice is dull ; your face is no mirror for your words. 
 You are not listening. If you have tame moments like this, do 
 not dream of ever moving the world. It is a block of stone ; 
 you cannot stir it without putting out all your strength. And 
 even then it will roll back and roll on to you if you relax your 
 utibrts. If you give yourself to art you may be great in it, I 
 think ; but if you love anything — any person— better than art, 
 do not touch it. Go, and be an ordinary woman like the rest.' 
 
 The words were harsh. The tears started to her eyes as she 
 heard them, and a hot colour rose over her face and throat. She 
 was silent. 
 
 'She never speaks of him. How fine that is !' thought 
 Eosselin. ' Most female creatures at her years babble of what 
 fills their thoughts, as birds chatter of the spring in April.' 
 
 Aloud he said : 
 
 ' You will not do any good to-day. You look ill, and you are 
 restless. Come with me to Paris ; I will show you something 
 which will interest you— and the weather is fine though cold. 
 Let us walk to Magny.' 
 
 She went with him in silence. 
 
 The day was drawing to a close as the train sped through the 
 dark fields of winter and entered Paris. A city was always 
 terrible and hateful to her. She loved air and light and the 
 solitude of sea and land. Crowds hurt her, and the labyrinth 
 of streets had never ceased to oppress and to bewilder her. She 
 felt amidst the walls and roofs as a young eagle feels barred up 
 in a cage. He talked to her of many things with that picturesque 
 detail with which his great knowledge of the city and of the
 
 3H OTHMAR. 
 
 world filled his conversation. He endeavoured to interest and 
 distract her ; he strove to amuse and arouse her. But he felt 
 that he succeeded but indifferently. Her thoughts were not 
 with him ; she was silent and she was nervous. 
 
 When night fell he took her with him to the Theatre 
 Fran^ais ; not for the first time. It was the night of a j^rcmiere 
 of a great dramatist. The house was filled with the choicest 
 critics of Paris ; the most famous actors occupied the classic 
 stage. Behind the grating of the hidden box to wliich he led 
 her she could see without being seen. Before this she had been 
 only taken to rehearsals in the daytime ; she had never seen a 
 great theatre in the full bla/.e of one of its gala nights. It 
 blinded and ojipressed her. She longed for the coolness, for the 
 shadows, for the dewy stillness of the country. The pungent 
 scents, the blazing lights, the multitude of face.^, the hum of 
 voices, made her afraid ; afraid as she had not been ciU alone in 
 the hours of night adrift in her boat on the sea. 
 
 ' Watch and listen and learn,' said Rosselin. ' You may be 
 on this stage one day, or on none.' 
 
 She did not reply : the new play had begun ; the most 
 famous players in Paris acted with that exquisite grace and ease 
 which characterise them ; the ^jlay was witty and brilliant ; 
 each scene had its separate success, each phrase its separate 
 charm. Rosselin himself, vividly interested and keenly critical, 
 gave all his attention to the stage, and for the time forgot his 
 companion. When the curtain'fell upon the first act he turned 
 to speak to her ; he was startled to see that her face was pale as 
 death, and her eyes, wide open and fascinated, were fastened on 
 the opposite side of the house. He looked where she was look- 
 ing, and saw a great lady with a bouquet of orchids lying on the 
 cushion before her, and several gentlemen in her box behind her. 
 
 ' Ah, Madame Nadine ! ' murmured Rosselin. ' She docs not 
 often deign to honour a first night, even when it is Sardou's. 
 She is going to some great ball afterwards, I suppose, for look 
 at her cliamonds, and she has her Russian orders on. Voila 
 une veritahle grande dame ! ' 
 
 Damaris gazed at her without a word ; her eyes were strained, 
 her very lips were pale, she breathed quickly and painfully, the 
 theatre seemed to circle round and round her, and across its in- 
 tense light of all the many faces there she saw but this one. 
 When the second act began she had no ears fur it and no con- 
 sciousness of what was said or done in it. She never once 
 looked at the stage. Her eyes remained rivetted on the wife of 
 Othmar ; the voices of the actors were a mere dull babble to 
 her: when the audience laughed she knew not why they laughed, 
 when they applauded, she had no knowledge why they did so ; 
 all she f^aw was that delicate colourless beauty on the other side 
 of the house with the great jewels shining on it like stars.
 
 OTHMAR. 315 
 
 She looked, and looked, and looked till her eyes swam and 
 her heart grew sick. 
 
 This was the woman whom he loved, this great lady leaning 
 there with that look of utter indifierence on hur face, with that 
 slight smile as this man or the other entered her box, Avitli the 
 diamonds shining in the whiteness of her breast, with her un- 
 covered shoulders gleaming white as snow ; a hothouse flower in 
 all the rarity, the languor, the perfection, which the hothouse 
 gives. The same sense wliich had come to her in the drawing- 
 rooms of St. Pharamond came again to the chikl ; a sense of 
 rudeness, of rusticity, of inferiority, of coarseness in herself as 
 contrasted with that patrician elegance, that pale and languid 
 loveliness, that marvellous charm of the world and of its highest 
 form of culture. 
 
 ' What can I look like to him ! ' she thought with humilia- 
 tion. ' Beside her I must seem to him like some rude 
 peasant ' 
 
 All that she had felt vaguely before the mirrors of St. 
 Pharamond came back upon her embittered, intensified, made 
 conscious. She realised the immense distance that there was 
 between her and Othmar as she saw his wife. She realised the 
 grace and splendour of this life in the Avorld which they led. 
 She realised the passion which she had given to her. 
 She realised that she herself could only stand outside his life, 
 like a beggar outside his gates. 
 
 When the curtain fell again, Rosselin looked at her with 
 impatience. 
 
 ' You looked at that woman always, never at the stage,' he 
 said angrily. ' She is a great lady ; leagues above you, leagues 
 beyond you ; you have nothing in common with her. But one 
 day you may force her to hear you in this very house if you 
 choose. Will you choose % ' 
 
 ' She will not care,' said Damaris. 
 
 Tears were standing in her eyes ; the sense of an infinite 
 loneliness, and of a great inferiority, Avere on her. What would 
 it matter if she ever became famous yonder on those classic 
 boards ? That great lady would come and see her for an hour — 
 smile or censure — then forget. The dreams which she had 
 nurtured of compelling the admiration of the world, seemed to 
 dissolve like a mirage before the mere presence of Othmar'a 
 Avife. ' She would not care,' she said wearily. 
 
 To this patrician she would always be a half-barbarian and 
 inicultm'ed creature. Tlie heart of the child asked with long- 
 ing to go back to her old life in the sunny air by the blue 
 water, with the homely people, with the simple wants, with 
 the sound of the birds in the leaves, and the feel of the wind 
 on the sea. But she knew that never could she go back so any 
 more.
 
 5i6 OTHMAR. 
 
 If her feet were to travel thither, her soul would not go. 
 
 The passion of the world, the aims of ambition, the heart- 
 sickness of jealousy and desire were all in her ; where they liavc 
 passed the soul is for ever a stranger to peace, even as where 
 hre has burnt the soil of a green field, grass will grow no more. 
 
 ' Why did she not let me alone % ' she thought. 
 
 Between the second and the third ac's, Rosselin left her to go 
 to the foyer, where he had been for so many years so conspicuous 
 a figure, and so dreaded a critic. 
 
 ' Fasten the door after me, and if a thousand people should 
 knock, let no one in until you hear my voice,' he said to her, 
 drawing the door behind him. 
 
 Left to herself she drew back into the deepest shadow of the 
 little den she occupied, and gazed as she would at the woman 
 Avho had been destiny to her. She saw numerous gentlemen 
 come and go in her box, make their reverence to her, linger if 
 they were permitted, or withdraw and give place to others. 
 Nadine had changed her position so that her profile only was now 
 turned towards the house. She leaned her elbow on the cushion, 
 and her cheek on her hand, a butterfly of emeralds sparkled 
 under her .shoulder ; sometimes her face was hidden by the fan 
 of white ostrich feathers, sometimes she furled the fan and let it 
 lie unused beside the orchids. 
 
 Damaris watched her with the strange fascination of fear and 
 of wonder, of hatred and admiration, which had moved her 
 in the salons of St. Pharamond. All the words which Othmar 
 had spoken a few days before, were sounding in her ears. Her 
 simple and candid tlioughts were beginning to gain something 
 of the complexity, of the wearmess, of the pain of his. She 
 understood why he had loved this woman so much that, empty 
 though his heart might be, it would remain untenanted. Inno- 
 cent as Mignon, she yet watched her rival with something of the 
 passion of Adrienne Lecouvreur. 
 
 ' She is his, he is hers — and she does not care ! ' thought the 
 child, in whom the ignorance of childhood still lingered, blent 
 with the awakening strength and heat of a tropical nature. 
 
 As the curtain rose for the third act, Othmar himself entered 
 his wife's box. Damaris shrank farther and farther back against 
 tho wall, though she knew well that the keenest eyes could not 
 find her out in her obscurity. Her breath came hard and fast 
 like a panting hare's ; the great tears rose to her eyes ; she 
 suddenly realised what this world was which held him so closely. 
 She saw his wife give him the same sliglit smile that she gave to 
 others : no more. Slie saw liim bend before her with the same 
 low bow the otiiers gave ; she saw him converse with the gentle- 
 men near him ; from time to time he glanced round the house. 
 Once or twice his wife turned her head and spoke to him as she 
 spoke to the others. T<> tlr's cliild wlu) had the heart of Juliet,
 
 OTHMAli. :-,\7 
 
 the soul of Heloise, the conventionalities of the world seemed 
 like the frost of death, 
 
 ' She is his ; he is hers : and she does not care ! ' 
 That was all she could think of as she watched them across 
 that sea of light. The wit of the play amused him, and Othinar 
 looked less weary and more animated than usual. To her he 
 appeared happy. 
 
 Rosselin called thrice to her through the door before she 
 heard him and let him enter. 
 
 ' You should not dream like that when you are at the 
 Fran9ais. You should study. What more admirable lessons 
 can you have 1 ' he said angrily. ' Poets may dream if they like 
 They speak best in their trances. Those who would only 
 interpret them must never dare to do so. Have I not told you 
 so a score of times? There is nothing poetic about the stage; 
 it is all hard, prosaic, literal. If you will dream go and bury 
 yourself under green leaves, under yellow corn ; do not come to 
 the theatres of the world.' 
 
 Damaris for once did not even hear him. He looked across 
 the house and saw Othmar. 
 
 'Come,' he said to her, 'you will miss the last train that 
 pauses at Trappes if you do not come away now. Never will 
 tliey forgive me for leaving before the close ! But that will not 
 matter much. They know I am old ; they can think I am ill. 
 Come, or you will be too late.' 
 
 ' Wait a little,' said Damaris, in a shamed, hushed voice ; her 
 face grew red as she spoke. 
 
 Rosselin glanced impatiently at the box on the other side of the 
 house. He said nothing; he waited, artist as he was in all the tibr-s 
 of his nature ; his eyes and his ears and his art were all with (J(jt, 
 with the Coquelins, with the moving and speaking persons of the 
 stage : yet a little corner of his heart ached still for the child. 
 
 ' What wretchedness she prepares for herself ! ' he tliouglit 
 with pity and sorrow combined. ' She will never be a great 
 artist, because with her feeling will always take the mastery. 
 You are only a great artist if when you sutler, though you suffer 
 liorribly, you can study what you feel, you can make your own 
 heart strings into a lyre. If you cannot do that, you are only a 
 creature that loves another. Ah, my dear ! No one ever con- 
 quered the world so ! ' 
 
 He let her alone until the piece was over ; the box of the 
 Countess Othmar had been vacated some moments before the 
 termination of the last act. He did not speak to her whilst he 
 hurried her through private passages and into the frosty air of 
 the streets. 
 
 ' Cover yourself well, it is cold,' was all he said as he took 
 her with gentle steps over the pavement which his feet had 
 trodden so many thousands of times, in the hurry of youth, in
 
 J 
 
 1 8 OTHMAR. 
 
 the ecstasy of triumph, in all the alternations of a manhood 
 tossed up and down upon the stormy seas of public favour and 
 of public caprice. All that network of streets about the Franq'ais 
 was as dear to him as the banks of Doon to Burns, as the green 
 wood and ways of Milly to Lamartine, as the sweet meads and 
 streams of Penshurst to Philip Sydney. 
 
 Damaris walked on beside him, her head bent, her face 
 covered. The tears were rolling slowly down her cheeks. 
 
 ' Let me do what 1 would,' she thought, ' she would not care.' 
 
 Rosselintook her home to his own little house that night, for 
 it was too late to return to Les Hameaux. He made her seat 
 herself by liis fire ; he dried the damp of the night on her hair 
 and her clothes ; he would have made her eat of his preserved 
 nectarines and drink of his choice wines which were sent by his 
 friends. But she would not touch anything. She sat lost in 
 thought. 
 
 All she saw was that beautiful woman ; all she heard was 
 the voice of Othmar saying, ' I have so loved her that I shall 
 never love any other woman ever again.' 
 
 No doubt it was so : she could understand. Only he seemed 
 to go away from her, herself, utterly and for ever ; to glide out 
 of her life as the shijjs she had used to watch from her balcony, 
 as the nightingales sang under the moon, used to pass away 
 further and further, till the great distance and the shadows of 
 night swallowed them up and they were no more seen, and all 
 the wide sea was empty. 
 
 Rosselin watched her sadly. 
 
 ' Poor Mignon,' he thought. ' Who shall transform her to a 
 Mademoiselle I\Iars % How does the gymnast teach his cliild to 
 stand and catch the metal ball, to tread and hold the rope in 
 air. He works and kneads the tender flesh till it grows hard, 
 he strains the soft limbs till tliej' become like steel, he bends 
 and twists and forces, and forges the immature sinews and 
 tendons till they ai'e like cords to resist, and in every sejiarate 
 muscle there almost seems a separate bi'ain. When their nature 
 has been driven out a' d tlie body has become an iron macliine 
 the teailier has succeeded. Who shall do for her mind and her 
 lieart what tlie gymnast does to his son's limbs and spine ? And 
 will ever anybody do it ? Will she ever be Mars — be Rachel % 
 Will she ever (ling her si>ul away and keej? only her body and her 
 brain? And if slie do Udt do that what success wiirshe ever have?' 
 
 In that kind of cruelty with which the true artist would 
 always emulate any living thing to art, he almost wished that 
 Othmar were a man witli less honinir and less compassion, more 
 license and more selfishness. 
 
 ' If he would break her heart and rouse her hatred how mucii 
 art would gain,' he thought. ' She would pass through the fire 
 like Goethe's dancing girl, and come out of it immortal.'
 
 OTHMAR. 319 
 
 He knew the weakness of love, and he knew the strength of 
 genius. 
 
 'Listen to me,' he said, as the wood-fire gleamed and mur- 
 mured. ' You dream too much of Othmar. ' I understand he 
 was your saviour ; he is your hero, your saint, your god : all 
 that is inevitable ; and he is a man whom women will always 
 love, because he has a great grace and gentleness about him, 
 and his discontent and sadness are in picturesque contrast with 
 his magnificent and enviable fortunes. But he will never love 
 you, my child just because he has so loved that woman, that 
 his heart has grown cloyed, yet cold ; great passions always 
 leave that kind of satiety behind them. And then the world 
 holds him, a hundred thousand invisible threads bind him ; if 
 he had the heart left for it, which he has not, he \vould not 
 have the time to turn back ; his life is fixed, such as it is, and 
 he and the world are wedded together, though it may not be 
 the si)ouse he would have chosen. Do not either live for him 
 or die for him. What will she say it you do either % That you 
 are a love-sick fool. 1 do not talk to you as moralists would 
 talk, because I do not believe in conventional morality ; it is an 
 absurdity, like all conventional things. No doubt your old 
 friend IMelville would speak much better than I do, but i speak 
 honestly, and according to my lights. You have wished, and 
 the wish has seemed to me natural, to compel recognition of 
 your own powers from the person who first caused you to leave 
 the happy obscurity of your life. You have said that you 
 wish her to see you can have a greatness she has not. It is a 
 personal motive, and art is best served by impersonal motives. 
 Still it seems to me natural. I can understand it. But to do 
 this you must be strong, you must behold, you must be true to 
 yourself. Y"ou must not be overcome because you see her 
 looking like the great lady she is. There is only one thing 
 which the wife of Othmar respects, it is genius ; she respects 
 that because her intellect appreciates, and her gold cannot buy, 
 it. Prove to her that it is in you, and she will respect you. If 
 you died for her lord to-morrow, she would only say that you 
 had forgotten you were not upon the stage. I seem to speak 
 harshly and roughly. Ah, my dear, my heart is neither ; but 
 I wish to save you from your own heart if I can. You are all 
 alone, and you are scarcely more than a child, and the world, 
 the world, is a beast.' 
 
 She did not answer ; her head was bent down on her arms, 
 and her face was hidden ; all he could see was the hot flush on 
 the ivoiy of her throat, and the curling hair which was made 
 golden by the ruddy light from the leaping flames. 
 
 All her dreams and aspirations and ambitions seemed all 
 huddled together, bruised and colourless, like a heap of child'a 
 toys broken and faded.
 
 120 OTHMAR. 
 
 J 
 
 ' She would not care ! that was all she thought. If t!; t 
 world were to give her fame, what would the best that she 
 could ever reach seem to the unreachable disdain of that other 
 woman ? No more than the gleam of a glow-worm may seem to 
 the planet on high. 
 
 A rude sun-bi'owned wench of the sea and the land, good to 
 row through blue water, and mow down green billows of grass : 
 that was all she would ever seem to Othmar's wife. 
 
 ' Tell me what you wish,' she said in a low tone. ' If I can 
 I will do it.' 
 
 The voice of Rosselin shook a little as he answered, ' My 
 child I want you to do Avhat she cannot. These people have 
 all things ; they have ease and mirth, and soft beds, and minds 
 without care, and great riches, and great palaces, and great 
 jowers, but there are two things which often escape them, and 
 ofttimes the poor have the one and now and then they are born 
 to the other. I mean that great consoler of the humble, con- 
 tent, and that great redresser of injustice, genius. You have 
 the latter. In your sea-gull's nest the Muses found you. Oh, 
 child, be grateful ! You are richer than the kings who ruled 
 here in Paris — -if only you knew your riches I ' 
 
 She looked up at him suddenly, pushing her troubled curls 
 out of her eyes. 
 
 ' If I spoke before her my throat would dry up — my voice 
 would be strangled in it. If I were to do well, she would never 
 care. If I were to fail, she would smile. I should see her 
 smile in my grave. He loves her you know, he loves her so 
 much, but she has made his heart numb in him with her indif- 
 ference and her scorn.' 
 
 He was awed and amazed at such intensity of dread in a 
 nature wliich had always seemed to him bold as the winds, and 
 resolute and headstrong. 
 
 'Yes,' he said, almost brutally. 'If you fail she will smile, 
 she will laugh ; she knows nothing of failure. But you will not 
 fail. Only the weak fail. You are strong. You will not let 
 that woman think that you threw away your geniiis for love 
 of her lord ! ' 
 
 They were words which were hard and rough and brutal ; 
 but they seemed to him the wisest words that he could speak. 
 She was a child with a passionate heart half bi'oken ; unless 
 that heart were torn out and trodden under her foot, he 
 thought that she would never walk straight to where the laurels, 
 the bitter laurels, grew. 
 
 He meant to do well ; he spoke according to his light ; but 
 he was only a man and childless, and forgot a little what easily 
 bruised things the hearts of some women are when they are very 
 young, and have hot blood in their veins, and are all alone in a 
 world which feels to them as the stony road of the moorland
 
 OTHMAR. 321 
 
 feels to the shot doe when there is many a long mile to be 
 covered between her and the herd. 
 
 She turned her head from him quickly, and he saw the dark 
 red flush which stained her throat. 
 
 She did not answer. The words brought no solace to her. 
 Her heart was empty. He saw the great tears roll slowly down 
 her cheeks. He realised that the hilt of this two-edged swoi'd 
 which he held out to her was too cold a pillow for so young a 
 breast. 
 
 CHAPTER XLHI. 
 
 The weeks passed on, and Othmar returned no more to the 
 fields of Chevreuse. The great interests and the vast opera- 
 tions of his house occupied his time, and the days of this man 
 whom Nature had created a dreamer and a student, went away 
 in the considex'ation of financial enterprises, in the audience of 
 innumerable supplicants, in the emission of national loans, and 
 in the study of political situations. He thought oftentimes of 
 her, but he went to her no more. To let her alone he knew 
 was, as Rosselin said, all tliat he could do for her. 
 
 His wife he scarcely saw at this season. 
 
 Now and then when it was unavoidable he went with her to 
 some great dinner or reception ; oftener they received at home 
 themselves, and on such evenings he saw her in all the grace 
 and elegance which the highest culture and the utmost fashion 
 can lend to a woman already patrician in every fibre of her 
 being. Sometimes she addressed a few words to him con- 
 cerning the children, or the horses, or some matter of mutual 
 interest ; and he saw her carriage passing in and out, her friends 
 and acquaintances coming and going on the stairs, her attendants 
 carrying her chocolate, or her bouquets, or the ofl'erings made 
 Jier by her courtiers : that was all. In no year had she been 
 more absorbingly mondaine ; in no year had she been so con- 
 spicuous as the greatest lady in Paris ; in no year had her balls, 
 her fetes, her banquets, her concerts, been more wonderful in 
 their novelty and more exclusive in their invitations. 
 
 '■Dame! elle a un chic incroyahie ! thought Blanchette, 
 angrily, watching her and conscious that her day was not done 
 as she had hoped. 
 
 Meantime, in the brilliant movement of which his house was 
 the centre, Othmar felt that he was becoming rapidly a mere 
 cypher amidst it all, as Platon Napraxine had been, and he 
 perceived no way by which he could recover his influence 
 without her ridicule and the world's comment. That had come 
 to him which he had said should never come : he was nothing 
 in her life, not so much as one of her mere acquaintances. 
 
 o
 
 322 OTHMAR. 
 
 Sucli a position had always seemed to him the deepest 
 humiliation that any man could accept ; he had always thought 
 that any man might save his dignity if lie could not secure his 
 own happiness ; but now, he saw how easy it is to theorise, how 
 difficult it is to resist the slow insidious influence of circum- 
 stances. We drift into i)ositions which we hate without being 
 conscious of our descent, and the effect of others upon our 
 nature and our actions is as subtle and as unperceived as those 
 of climate or of time. 
 
 He could not have said when the first coldness had come 
 between himself and her, when the first irritation had crept 
 into their intercourse, when the first frost of indifference had 
 passed from her manner over the warmth of his own emotions. 
 It had been unperceived, uncounted, but its results had grown 
 and strengthened, until now they were like ten thousand other 
 men and women in the world, living under the same roof, but 
 wholly strangers to each other, only united by one slender 
 thread, their mutual interests. It was a position which wounded 
 him, humiliated him, oppressed him with a constant sense of 
 weakness and of failure : he had not the slightest power over 
 her, though she retained much over him ; strong men, he 
 thought, either left their wives or foi'ced them to keep their 
 marriage vows ; and he did neither. 
 
 Of late she had become almost insolent in her tone to him ; 
 she seemed to take pleasure in passing the most marked slights 
 upon him ; she purposely withheld from him the slightest 
 acquaintance with her movements or intentions, and at times 
 her eyes looked at him with a cynical disdain. 
 
 It was absurd, he felt, and exaggerated, and probably wholly 
 ungrounded i-n every way, but there were moments when he 
 imagined that she wished to remind him of his social inferioi-ity 
 to herself, moments when the recollection of the origin of the 
 Othmar fortunes spoilt for a passing hour her pleasure in the 
 existence of her children. Though he did not harbour the sus- 
 picion, but threw it away from him as unworthy of botli himself 
 and her, it yet existed and made him over-sensitive to any 
 slight upon her part, quick to perceive the faintest tinge of con- 
 tempt in her tone to him. He knew that she could count her 
 great ancestries far l^oyond the dim days of Rurick ; whilst 
 there were courts of Europe where feudal etiquette still pre- 
 vailed strongly enough to make his presence in their thrune- 
 rooms impossible. Tliese were mere nominal dift'erences, no 
 doubt, and he might perchance have saved from bankruptcy the 
 very :;tate in which he would have been forbidden to pass the 
 palace gates if he had sought to accompany her through them ; 
 but still there were moments when the voice and the glance of 
 his wife recalled these conventional things to him out of the 
 limbo of absolute nullity in which, but for those, he let them
 
 OTHMAR. y^l 
 
 He. Never by any spoken word or hint had she ever reminded 
 him of them, yet now and then in her cokler moments he 
 thought : ' Perhaps she remembers tliat two hundred years ago 
 if her forefathers rode over the plains of Croatia they could, 
 ride down mine before them, and drive them with their whips 
 like so many acoin-cating swine ! ' 
 
 He began to believe that she was in truth as cruel as the 
 world had always called her ; and a feeling which was almo&fc 
 hatred at times a-.voke in him and blent with the suftering she 
 caused him. 
 
 It seemed to him that no man on earth ever gave a woman 
 such passion and such worship as he had given her ; these might 
 at least, he thought, have secured respect from her, even if they 
 l:ad failed to hold her sympathy. 
 
 He said nothing to her. Remonstrance would have been 
 useless, supplication unmanly. He let time drift them where it 
 would ; and in the ever-exercising burden of his pain Damaris 
 became almost forgotten. 
 
 Some weeks after the performance of Lemberg's cantata, 
 Blanche de Laon, calling on the woman whom she hated on her 
 'jour,' came lace, stayed until the rooms were neaidy emptied 
 of their crowd, and then sank down beside her hostess on a low 
 couch in a corner palm-shadowed, where banks of lilies of the 
 valley gave out their fragrance under rose-shaded lamps, and 
 great .Japanese vases were tilled with the rosy flowers of the 
 gesneria and the philesia. She always paid great outward 
 deference to Nadcge, was coaxing and cdline, and for her alone 
 subdued the rudeness and the shrillness of her voice and manner. 
 She leaned now beside her on the broad low seat of the cushioned 
 corner, whilst the few people who remained in the rooms con- 
 versed in little groups, and the flowers, the iiorcelains, the 
 stuffs, the piciures, the embroidered satins of the walls, the 
 long vista of salons opening one out of another, made up one of 
 those pictures of liaraionised colour and of artistically arranged 
 luxuries of which the modern world is so full. Blanchette had 
 all manner of confidential things to disclose, secrets of this 
 toilette and that, of this scandal and the other, of the true 
 reason of a dear friend's sudden indisposition, and the actual 
 cause of a coming duel ; all these secrets de Folichinelle, which 
 society loves to carry about and distribute, things which are 
 mysteries of life and death yet whispered at every '■petit quart 
 dlieiire ' in every house known to fashion. 
 
 Nadine listened, leaning back amongst her cushions indiflfer- 
 ent, scarcely allecting attention, thinking of her own costume at 
 a coming ball she was about to give, in which the regne animal 
 of Cuvier was to furnish the dresses. She had chosen a panther. 
 All the yellow and black would make her delicate colourless 
 skin look so well, and she Avould wear all her diamonds, and 
 
 y 2
 
 324 OTHMAR. 
 
 She was aroused from her meditation by the question 
 
 which Blanche de Laon put suddenly to her. 
 
 ' Do tell me,' she said, leaning clown amongst her cushions : 
 'You know I like to be the first to hear things — when will the 
 new genius make her dcbnt with you ? ' 
 
 ' \Vhat do you mean ? ' 
 
 'Oh, you know what I mean; this young artist whom 
 Rosselin is training, in whom your husband is interested, and 
 wlio is to make her first appearance here ] Who is she ? Do 
 tell me about her. I should like to have her appear at my 
 h(juse if you have no proprietary rights to her exclusive pro- 
 duction.' 
 
 ' I have no idea of what person you speak of ; I am not fond 
 of untried artists,' she answered, with perfect indifierence, but 
 Llanchette saw a shade of surprise and a coldness of displeasure 
 on her face. 
 
 ' Oh, surely you like a debutante ? ' she said carelessly. ' It 
 always amuses people so much, something quite new, and 1 
 believe this girl is beautiful ; does not Othmar say so 1 ' 
 
 But by this time her hostess was on her guard, and her 
 expression wholly under control. 
 
 ' I think I know whom you mean now,' she replied in- 
 dfferentlj'. ' But as to a debnt here — that is c^uite in the future. 
 I am not fond of untried artists as I say : one does not take out 
 u:ibrokcn horses to drivi; in a crowd. Genius is admirable, but 
 I think like wine it wants time and a seal set upon it before one 
 oflers it at one's table.' 
 
 Blanche de Laon was perplexed. 
 
 ' Does she know all about her, or nothing about her 1 ' she 
 wondered. ' I want to know more myself before I go on 
 w:th it.' 
 
 Some other people approached them at that moment ; the 
 conversation turned on the rcgne animal ball ; Blanchette, dis- 
 appointed, rose and went and drank deux doujts de liqueur, and 
 ate a caviare biscuit, in another room, where Loris Loswa was 
 di awing some caricatures of mutual accpiaiiitances, as the beasts 
 of Cuvier, on liis visiting cards, and distributing them amongst 
 some ladies of fashion. 
 
 ' IMeet me on Saturday at eleven at the Bond point," she 
 mui mured to him as she took from him a sketch of her brother- 
 in-law the Due d'Ypres as a wild boar in top boots, over which 
 she condescended to shriek lier shrillest laughter and approval. 
 
 AVhen her rooms were all quite emptied, and she was left 
 ah ne in them, Nadine remained leaning back amoiigst the 
 cushiims motionle&s and with a cold contemptuous anger on 
 her face. 
 
 'To think that I should accept such a part as that !' she 
 thought. ' He must be mad and the wliole wcu'ld >vith bim 1'
 
 OTHMAR. 3-5 
 
 Weak women, indulgent women, women who were afraid 
 and wanted pardon for their own secrets, these women did tliese 
 tilings, aided their husbands' amours, received their husbands' 
 favourites, helped their husbands to conventional disguises of 
 equivocal situation?, but that role was not hers. 
 
 ' And he came from this girl to me in Russia ; ' she thought 
 with that physical disgust which is so strong in some women, and 
 which men never understand. 
 
 One forenoon on entering his study, Othmar missed from the 
 wall the sketch made by Loswa. There was only a blank space 
 between the places of the Corot and the Aivanotfsky. He rang 
 for the major-domo. 
 
 ' Who has taken the portrait from that place ? ' he asked ; he 
 feared the entrance of some thief from the gardens. 
 
 The major-domo, astonished and alarmed, replied that he 
 had taken it down that morning by command of his mistress, 
 and had sent it whither she had directed him to do ; to a certain 
 gallery recently built on the Trocadero. 
 
 ' You were quite right to do so if Madame desired you,' 
 said Othmar ; and dismissed the official without more com- 
 ment. 
 
 As soon as he could be admitted to his wife's presence, he 
 went to her and opened the subject with scanty preface. 
 
 ' Philippe says that you ordered him to send the sketch by 
 Loswa out of my study to the new gallery on the Trocad 'ro,' 
 he said, when he had made her his usual greeting. ' Is that 
 true % ' 
 
 ' Very true. One would think I had ordered him to blow up 
 the Louvre or the Luxembourg ! ' 
 
 ' May I venture to inquire your reasons ? ' 
 
 ' Certainly. There is an exhibition of Loswa's works about 
 to be opened there. You are aware that these exhibitions of a 
 single master are very j^opular now. That head is one of the 
 best things he has done. It will come back to you in three 
 months. Cannot you live without it till then ? ' 
 
 Othmar felt that he coloured like a boy. 
 
 'I would, of course, have lent it,' he said with a little hesi- 
 tation. 
 
 ' I have sent all his portraits of myself and of the children,' 
 she said with a cold glance at him. ' You do not appear to have 
 missed those.' 
 
 ' I have probably not entered the rooms in which they hung. 
 If you will pardon my saying so, I do not care to know less of 
 what you wish to do than my servants know — and to know it 
 tirst through them.' 
 
 ' If I had told you, you would have objected. When I know 
 that people will object, I never ask them what they wish.' 
 
 ' The method has the merit of simplicity,'
 
 3:6 OTHMAR. 
 
 He felt exceedingly angered ; in the first place lie did not 
 care to have the portrait seen by all Paris at a moment when the 
 original was living so near Paris with no friend but himself, and 
 in the second place he indignantly resented being treated like a 
 cypher in his own houses ; he never permitted himself to intrude 
 on her personal arrangements — could she not respect his % 
 
 Now and then, and above all of late, there had been some- 
 thing high-handed and even insolent in her occasional treatment 
 of things which concerned him, and on which she did not con- 
 sult him ; something which made him fancy that in the deepest 
 depth of the thoughts and feelings there was occasionally the 
 remembrance that the great race of princes from whom she 
 herself descended would have deemed her alliance with one of 
 the princes of finance a gross mesalliance. 
 
 'J'liis was a trifle, no doubt, and he was not a man who ever 
 disputed small matters. But the tone with which she had 
 spoken had given it something of personal oftence, and he could 
 not shake from him the impression that she had purposely sent 
 away the portrait. The exhibition was about to take place, no 
 doubt, at the new gallery on the Trocadero ; Loswa having 
 quarrelled violently with the committee of the Salon, had 
 chosen to prove that the collection of his works would be more 
 attractive to the public than anything which the Salon coidd 
 olTer without his assistance ; but the manner in which this 
 sketch had been removed from his study, conveyed to Othmar 
 the impression of some personal motive, some personal meaning 
 in the act. 
 
 Cai)ricious as his wife always was, she yet was usually cour- 
 teous. This insolence of the removal of his picture was unlike 
 her. 
 
 She always held the very true creed that mutual politcncs.^ 
 is the first of obligations to render the intimacy of daily life 
 endurable. 
 
 lie left her presence quickly, afraid of what his anger might 
 bring him into saying. He had never as yet wholly lost his 
 temper with her, though there were times when it was sorely 
 tried. 
 
 Her cold, nonchalant, slighting tone was that which always 
 tried it the most. Of all things which he most hated it was to 
 be spoken to as Platon Napraxine had been ; like tlie last of her 
 lacqueys ! as he thought bitterly now. She looked after him 
 with some scorn. 
 
 ' Is he gone to the Trocadero to seize back his lost treasure % ' 
 
 She had sent the sketch thither on purpose to see what he 
 would do or say. 
 
 Witli an impul.se which was as swift as thought itself and 
 whicli he did not pause to consider, he turned liack as he reached 
 the threshold of her boudoir, and stood before her.
 
 OTHMAR. 327 
 
 VNndege,' he began with an impetuosity which yet had a 
 certani timidity in it. ' There is something which I wished to 
 tell you the other day. There is a reason which makes nie es- 
 pecially regret that you should have sent that portrait for exhi- 
 bition without referring the matter to me. Are you inclined to 
 be patient enough to hear a little tale wdiich might interest you 
 perhaps if it were a sketch by Ludovic Halevy, but I fear will 
 not do so told in my poor words ? ' 
 
 He did not observe the expression of her eyes, which sur- 
 veyed him with a cynical coldness, as she asked : 
 
 ' Do you mean that you have Avritten a romance 1— or played 
 one?' 
 
 There was the mockery in the words which he had dreaded 
 BO much that he had put off this moment day after day, week 
 after week, month after month. 
 
 'Neither,' he answered, curtly. *I have not talent for the 
 one, nor time and inclination for the other. You may believe 
 me,' he added a little bitterly, 'if I had been foolish enough to 
 tempt fate with either, your indulgence is the last mercy for 
 •which I should hojie.' 
 
 Her eyes still looked at him coldly, steadfastly ; with no 
 revelation in her gaze of whether she were surprised, interested, 
 inditlerent, or already wearied. 
 
 She was leaning back in her long low chair ; there was a 
 great deal of lace ruffled at her bosom and on her arms ; she 
 wore a long loose satin gown of palest rose. ejfeuiUee of which the 
 lights and shadows were very beautiful : her hands were tightly 
 clasped upon her lap ; her great pearls gleamed behind the lace ; 
 she looked like a woman of the time of the Stuarts or- of the 
 "Valois. At her elbow stood an immense bowl of Louise de 
 Savoy roses ; as she looked at liim she drew out one and put it 
 in her bosom. She did not speak or attempt to aid hini in any 
 way to continue the conversation which he had begun. She 
 only waited, and as he saw her in that impassible attitude, his 
 task grew harder to him ; that sudden sense of her cruelty, of 
 her want of sympathy, of her immovable indiflerence, which 
 had come to him so sharply on the night of her return from 
 Russia, struck him once more and liardened in him almost to 
 dislike. 
 
 ^Vhy should he tell her anything ? She cared nothing for 
 what he did or what he felt. She dwelt in that serene rarefied 
 atmosphere of her own in which no passions or pains of his could 
 disturb her. If she had once seemed to him to lean from it for 
 a little while to share his emotions, that time was passed, long 
 passed, never to return again. 
 
 She was silent many minutes, but she asked no question, 
 threw out no conjecture, did not even by a glance assist him to 
 begin his ollered narrative. If she would only have said some-
 
 328 OTHMAR. 
 
 thing — anything — it would have broken the ice at least. But 
 the marble bust of herself which stood near her, carved by Hil- 
 debrand, was not more mute than slie ; and she was quite 
 motionless, her hands clasped on another rose with which she 
 toyed. 
 
 He was angered with himself to feel that his cheeks grew 
 warm, and that his voice was nervous as he said at last : 
 
 ' I regret that the portrait is gone to the Trocadero, because 
 the original of it is living near Paris, and it may lead to com- 
 ment and conjecture which may be injurious to her ; she is 
 scarcely more than a child, and she will be an artist ; she is 
 better without the attention of the public untU she challenges it 
 directly.' 
 
 He did not notice a gleam like that of such which flashed 
 over him one instant from the unrevealing eyes of his wife ; the 
 next moment the eyes of the bust were not colder and more 
 impenetrable than hers. 
 
 ' I have long meant to tell you,' he continued with rapidity, 
 his words now coming with eagerness and eloquence from his 
 lips. ' But I have been afraid of your ridicule. Long ago, in 
 the midsummer of last year, I found the child of Bonaventure 
 dying in the streets. It was at the time my uncle was on his 
 death-bed. 1 did all I could for her, of course. She was long 
 ill ; when she recovered I placed her in the country with good 
 simple people whom 1 knew. She is there now. Rosselin, the 
 great actor whose name you will remember, though his career 
 was over before your time or mine, has trained her these many 
 months past ; he believes she has great talents ; that she has a 
 future ; that when you predicted the career of Desclee for her 
 you showed your usual insight. She has had little but sorrow 
 since that day you tempted her from her island ; it has always 
 seemed to me that we owed her a great debt, that we had done 
 her a great brutality ; but for us her life would have gone on in 
 peace and prosperity, she would never have left her little king- 
 dom ; if you realised what you did that day you Avould regret 
 your caprice. Tliere are many more details 1 could tell you if 
 you cared to hear them, but I know your intolerance of any 
 demand upon your patience.' 
 
 She smiled slightly ; the smile was very chill ; it checked the 
 expansion and the confidence of his words. 
 
 ' You are pleased to ridicule my knight-errantry, no doubt,' 
 he said, with heightened colour in his face. ' But no man living 
 would have done less than I did, I think, being conscious as I 
 was that the invitation which you gave her without tliought was 
 the origin of all her unmerited misfortune. I believe yt)u wore 
 right that she has genius or something very nearly approaching 
 genius, in her ; and it may be that the world will in time com- 
 pensate to her for all she has lost. But meantime '
 
 OTHMAR 329 
 
 ' You do so ! ' 
 
 Tlie words were very calm and cold, but tlicy struck Otlimar 
 like the cut of a Avhip. They cast on his words the dishonour 
 of disbelief. 
 
 He strove to command his temper as he replied : ' I do not ; 
 no one can ; she lost what no one ever can give back to her, 
 Avlien you showed her what tlie world was like, and taught her 
 discontent. But for you, and that one evening in your house, 
 she would have lived, and married, and spent all the even 
 tenour of her days in her native air, on her native soil, as 
 ignorant of ambition as any of the sea-birds on her coast.' 
 
 She looked at him with an expression of fatigue, and of 
 exhausted patience ; he saw that she was perfectly incredulous, 
 that his words might as well have remained unspoken for any 
 impression of their truthfulness which they conveyed to her. 
 
 ' Is this all j'our story ? ' she asked. 
 
 ' It is the outline of it all,' he answered. ' If you care to 
 know more of the causes which drove her from her home ' 
 
 ' They do not interest me in the least. ' 
 
 Her voice was as chill as frost. 
 
 ' Then allow me to apologise for having intruded even so 
 much as tliis on your atttention.' 
 
 He bowed before her, and was about to leave the room ; but 
 slie, without rising a hair's breadtli from tlie languid attitude in 
 which she reclined, said, 'Wait.' 
 
 He waited, in sanguine expectation of an impulse of sym- 
 pathy in which those more generous instincts, those kinder 
 emotions which sometimes swayed her, would be aroused on 
 behalf of a life she had thoughtlessly injured. 
 
 Still without rising she stretched out her arm, and took up 
 a blotting-book from her writing-cabinet, which stood near. 
 In the blotting-case was a tiny note-book of ivoiy and silver ; 
 she opened it, and read from it in a serene voice certain dates. 
 
 ' Before you give your idyl to Hale'vy — or to the journalists 
 in general — let me renew your memory with these memoranda,' 
 she said in the same soft cold voice. ' Your narrative, as you 
 tell it, is bald and wanting, as you admit, in detail. I Avill 
 supply some of those details. On June 10 you brought Damaris 
 Berarde to this house, where she remained ill for many days, 
 even weeks. On July 20 you went yourself to visit her cousin, 
 the present proprietor of the island of Bonaventure, and en- 
 deavoured to negotiate through bankers of Aix the purchase of 
 the island, which, however, the owner refused to sell. On 
 August 2 you had her taken, accompanied by her gardes- 
 vialades, to the farm of the Croix Blanche, which lies between 
 the villages of Les Hameaux and Magny. On August 15 you 
 visited Les Hameaux. In the last week of July, many objects 
 vf artistic interest and value had been already sent by you to
 
 330 OTHMAR. 
 
 the farmhouse. In llie same week, rentes to the amount of a 
 hundred thousand francs, were purchased on the Bourse in the 
 name of Daraaris Berarde. There are many more dates than 
 these in my note-book, but those are enough to supply the 
 hicunfe in your story. On pent broder dcssus without any great 
 imagination. A knowledge of human nature will suffice. You 
 will do me the favour never to re-open the subject ; and as a 
 matter of good taste, to endeavour that j^our idyl shall not be 
 too largely talked about for the amusement of the world in 
 general.' 
 
 Then she slid the little note-book within the leaves of 
 blotting-paper, and fastened the rose in the lace at her breast. 
 
 It was impossible for him to misunderstand her meaning. 
 
 A violent anger eclipsed for the moment all sense of 
 astonishment at her knowledge, or of wonder as to how she had 
 acquired it. All he was conscious of was the indignitj^, the 
 insult, put upon him by her utter disbelief. 
 
 He felt it a task almost beyond his strength to forbear from 
 some such words as men must never say to women, and in the 
 bewilderment of his emotions he was silent. 
 
 ' You have engaged an actor, once great, to give her lessons 
 in elocution,' she continued, in the same unmoved harmonious 
 tones. ' It is the fashion of the day to have a mistre&i on the 
 stage. I sujipose I cannot blame you for that. As it was I 
 who first suggested the future possibility of a dramatic success 
 for your protegee, it is, perhaps, natural that you should have 
 remembered my suggestions, when you sought the cover of some 
 artistic career for her. Someone has told me that you reserve 
 for me the part of Mrecena to her Roscia (can one feminise the 
 names ?), that you intend to have her talents first essayed and 
 pronounced on luider my roof ; that the world is to be invited 
 to smile at my credulitj-, or at my good nature, with Avhichever 
 it may most prefer to accredit me. Women often do such 
 things as this, I know, becMuse they are weak, or because they 
 need indulgence in return. But it is not a rule which will suit 
 either my temper or my taste. I see the convenience to your- 
 self of your project, but you must pardon me if I do not accept 
 the part you .wnuld assign me in it. The world and IMUe. 
 ]>erarde will have ojiportunities for mutual ac(|uaintance and 
 admiration without their first meeting each otlier in my draw- 
 ing-rooms. I should not have mentioned the matter unless you 
 liad done so first, but I should have prevented the execution of 
 your and of M. Rosselin's intentions ! ' 
 
 She looked at him from under her drooped eyelids, with 
 that critical observation which never deserted her in the most 
 trying hour, or before the deepest emotion. She did not hurry 
 him or dismiss him, only he knew by the look upon her face, 
 that the discussion was, in her vie\v of it, closed irrevocably.
 
 OTHMAR. ' 331 
 
 But for the salce of the other who was involved in her judg- 
 ment, he put aside his pride, his ofience, and his dignity, and 
 stooped to an appeah 
 
 'I do not know,' he said, and he was sensible that his voice 
 vibrated witli fury, as well as with emotion, ' I do not know 
 what steps you may have taken to enable you to tabulate my 
 actions so exactly, I keep no diary, but I have no doubt your 
 facts are correct. But as you put the data which have been 
 given you by some creature j'ou have stooped to employ, they 
 would certainly seem to point to some seltish intrigue on my 
 part, some vulgar use for my own ends of this young girl's 
 illness and misfortunes. It may be even quite natural that 
 you should take sucli a view of it as this, though it shows that 
 you do not, after all, much understand my character. But I 
 Avill adnnt that your suspicions may seem to you just. I will 
 admit that my own reticence has been blameable and unwise, 
 and I do not suppose you will believe how much your own habit 
 of ridicule, of irony, and of cruel scorn, has made me shrink 
 from provoking your malicious comments by any confidences 
 Avhich Avould seem to you sentimental and melodramatic' 
 
 He paused, ho2)ing for some word from her. But she spoke 
 none. She continued to listen and to wait, in unbroken silence 
 and serenity, her fingers toucliing the rose at her breast. A 
 momentary sense of rage passed quivering over him. He 
 iniderstood how men may in some moments kill the woman 
 they have loved best. 
 
 He restrained his passion with great effort, and tried to 
 keep his words within the compass of ordinary courtesy. 
 
 ' You do not know, and if you knew you would n(jt care for 
 it, how many a time this story, like many another thought and 
 memory of mine, has been upon my lips, and speech has been 
 stopped in me, merely because I was conscious you would laugh. 
 I am a fool in your eyes, worthy to die with Rolla, to fall with 
 Desgrieux, or any other absurd sentimentalist. 1 dare say you 
 will even despise me the more if you be compelled to believe 
 that, though I might be the lover of Damaris Berarde, I am not 
 so, Avhatever your spies may have told you.' 
 
 Her face flushed haughtily. 
 
 ' Spies ! I set no watcher on your actions until you deceived 
 me. When I know that 1 am deceived I have no mercy. Those 
 •who deceive me are outside my pale. I hunt them down. 
 Foolish women can bear to be blinded. I am not foolish, and 
 I do not consent to be so.' 
 
 ' I have never deceived you.' 
 
 She gave a gesture of dtprccat'on, slight but full of unuttered 
 disdain. 
 
 ' Long ago I told you that if you had strength enough in 
 you to tell me when you were weak, 1 should not be like other
 
 33^ OTHMAR. 
 
 women ; I should understand : to understand is always to for- 
 give ; a greater woman than I am has said it. If you had come 
 to me frankly, with no subterfuge, no pretext, no empty phrases 
 of untrue sentiments, but had said honestly that you were no 
 better than other men, I should have told you that follies of 
 that sort need never disturb our friendship nor our conhdence, 
 but ' 
 
 'But, my God, what had I to confess?' cried Othmar, with 
 that passionate protest of the tortured man Avho calls in vain 
 that he is innocent. 
 
 Infinite contempt swept over her face. What a fool he 
 seemed to her ! What a poor, weak coward and fool ! 
 
 ' If there were any lover whom I loved, how I should hurl 
 the truth of it in his face ! ' she thought. ' Men are such 
 cowards — so half-hearted and so tame, and never hardly even 
 knowing what they do love ! If he would only be truthful even 
 now, what should I care ! — a wretched child oft' the streets, a 
 creature who owes her very bread to him — what rival could she 
 be to me ! ' 
 
 She felt for him all the superb disdain that Cleopatra might 
 have felt had she known that Anthony toyed with a slave from 
 the market-place, and dared not plead guilty to his paltry sin. 
 
 He heard her with indignant and bewildered amaze. There 
 is a great simplicity in every honest man, and he, despite his 
 Icnowledge of the world, was single-minded as a boy. Tliat she 
 sliould refuse to believe him when he told the truth seemed to 
 him incredible. 
 
 ' Can you insinuate that I would speak such a lie — I \ ' he 
 cried to her in violent emotion. 
 
 She answered coldly : 
 
 * Oh, yes : those untruths are always counted as men's 
 honour.' 
 
 ' Tlicy are not mine ; nor my dishonour either. I never 
 willingly spoke an untruth yet to man or woman. If this child 
 were my mistress I would tell j'ou so. You may remember that 
 many a time you have bade me take my liberty. You would 
 care nothing if I did so. Why should I have concealed what 
 you Avould not have done me the honour to resent 1 ' 
 
 He paused, expecting lier to say some word of assent or 
 dissent, but slie remained silent. 
 
 'Certainly,' he said, bitterly, ' liad I considered nij'self free 
 in all ways I should have been justitied in doing so. Few men 
 of yijur world see less of you tlian 1. Your very lao(pieys know 
 more of your engagements and your intentions than I do. You 
 lend great brilliancy to my name, you give great distinction 
 to my houses, you allow my children to sit by you in your 
 carriage, and you permit me to receive kings for you in your 
 antechambei's. But more than that you deny nie, If I sought
 
 OTHMAR. 333 
 
 elsewhere the tenderness I seek in vain from you, could you 
 complain of my infidelity 1 ' 
 
 ' I do not complain of the infidelity ; it is immaterial ; I 
 complain of the long series of elaborate deceptions with which 
 you have endeavoured, with which you still endeavour, to 
 surround it.' 
 
 ' I repeat, there has been no deception.' 
 
 She laughed, laughed slightly tliat cruel laugh of a woman, 
 which can tell a man with impunity what a man could never 
 dare to tell him— that he has lied. 
 
 ' You dare to doubt me still ! ' he exclaimed, with that 
 blindness and good faith with which a man, candid and honest 
 himself, expects credence from others ; he had never in his 
 heart really doubted that when he should tell the truth to her 
 she would believe it. 
 
 Conscious rectitude has a curious pathetic ignorance of its 
 own impotence to move others ; it imagines that it has but to 
 t-peak and mountains will fall before it. 
 
 Because this thing Avas clear as daylight to his own know- 
 ledge, to his own conscience, he stupidly thought that it must 
 stand out plain as the noonday to her likewise. Those who 
 tell the truth always fancy that the truth must be like those 
 trumpets before which the walls of Jericho fell. 
 
 ' You dare to doubt my word ! ' he cried again passionately ; 
 she looked him full in the face coldly and calmly. 
 
 ' Told earlier,' she said in her serenest voice, ' your comedy 
 might have deceived even me. Told now, I do not think it 
 would deceive the most credulous woman living — and I am not 
 credulous. I am like IMontaigne ; I do not accept miracles out 
 of church.' 
 
 His face grew white and grey with wounded pride and 
 breathless passion as he heard her. The same sense of hope- 
 lessness which had come over so many of her lovers when driven 
 to appeal to a mercy which had no existence in her, came over 
 him now. He felt that one might throw one's self for ever 
 against the smooth white marble of her soul, and never gain 
 from it either pity or belief. 
 
 His patience was at an end, and his bitter sense of wrong, 
 done to himself and to one absent, broke down all his self- 
 control. 
 
 ' But as God lives you shall believe ! ' he cried to her. 'You 
 shall believe it for her sake, not for mine nor yours. You can 
 cover the whole world with the tine scorn of your scepticism if 
 you will, but you shall believe this. 1 may have done unwisely 
 what I have done for her. I may have acted with that mule- 
 like stupidity which you consider the characteristic of men. I 
 may even, God forgive me, have not done what was best for the 
 cliild herself ; but in all that I have done, I have been honest
 
 334 OTHMAR. 
 
 in it, and not a mere lecherous egotist. You have never deigned 
 to try and measure tlie feeling with which I have regarded you, 
 but you ought, I think, to understand enougli of the common 
 honour which I sliare witli all men who are not scoundrels, to 
 bulieve in my word when I give it you. The woman with whom 
 she lives at Les Hameaux is of good repute and blameless con- 
 duct. Rosselin, who has become her teacher, is a man too 
 upright to accord his assistance in any common intrigue. The 
 money I placed to her credit she imagines to be a legacy of her 
 grandfather, whose heiress she would have been if you in a 
 moment of unaccountable and unconsidered caprice had not 
 tempted lier to incur tlie old man's anger. All these things are 
 capable of the simplest explanations. Still, I Avill concede that, 
 without explanation, they may have appeared siijgular and sus- 
 picious to you. But, however much they may do so, I expect 
 from you that acceptance of my bare word, that belief in my 
 common honour, which the merest stranger to me on earth would 
 not dare to refuse.' 
 
 She preserved her perfect composure, the rose in her bren.sb 
 was not ruflled by one uneven breath ; she looked at him with 
 cold, calm, unkind eyes, which never wavered in their rejection 
 of him. 
 
 ' You are melodramatic,' she said, with her serene contempt. 
 ' Perhaps you will appear on the stage, too ! I sliall l)e glad if 
 you will spare me more words on such a subject. I sliall not 
 resent it publicly. All 1 request of you is to avoid publicity in 
 it as far as possible. That is a mere matter of good taste.' 
 
 ' Good God ! ' he cried, beside himself. ' Do you credit tliat 
 I should stand here and lie to you ? Do you believe that I 
 should stoop so low? — do you think that 1 come here like a 
 comedian to repeat a monologue of my own invention? You 
 may think what else of me that you will, but this you shall not 
 think. I am not the lover of Damaris Berarde ; 1 have never 
 been so — I shall never be so.' 
 
 ' If you swore it on the lives of your own children, I would 
 not believe you ? ' 
 
 Some retlex and heat of the tlame of his rage caught her 
 poul also for one sudden instant, and drew it out for that one 
 instant from its serenity and reticence. 
 
 There was the viliration of intensost passion in her voice ; 
 she half rose from her seat ; her bosom lieaved ; the rose fell in 
 a shower of leaves to the tioor ; for the moment he thought that 
 she would .'strike liim. 
 
 ' You shall Itelieve me,' he said in answer, ' or I will not 
 live under the same roof with you ! ' 
 
 Then he looked at her with one last look, and left lier 
 presence.
 
 OTHMAR. 335 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. 
 
 Othmak went into his great library, and shut the door upon 
 himself. For more than an hour lie paced to and fro the length 
 of the room, overcome with an agitation which he could not 
 master. He had a sense that his life was over. He felt as 
 though his very heart-strings had snapped and parted for ever. 
 A great love cannot perish without some such throb as a strong 
 animal life sufi'ers when it is forcibly torn asunder. A kind of 
 horror seized him at the idea of the yeai'S which were to come ; 
 the long, long years through which he would dwell in apparent 
 amity beside her in the sight of the Avorld. 
 
 His first impulse was to go out of the house, out of the city, 
 out of the world, to leave her everything he possessed, ^but 
 never to see her face again. 
 
 But a brief reflection made him feel how impossible such a 
 course as that woidd be to him. Obscure people can do tliese 
 things, they are happy ; they are not set in the fierce light of 
 publicity and society, and no one heeds it if they creejj away to 
 lay their aching heads under some lowly roof in solitude. But 
 to a man well known and conspicuous in tlie life of the world, 
 any such retreat into obscurity is imjiossible. He is bound hand 
 and foot by a million threads, each strong as cables to hold him 
 to his place. He cannot forsake his place without foi'saking a 
 mass of interests confided to his honour. Solitude is for ever 
 forbidden to him, and liberty he can never more recover. Life 
 never gives two opposite sets of gifts to the same recipient ; it 
 never bestows both the king's dominion and the peasant's peace. 
 The sigh of Henry IV. upon his sleepless couch is the sigh of 
 all eminence wliatever be its throne. 
 
 Othmar's momentary longing to go far away from everything 
 and everyone he had ever known, and never again behold the 
 woman whom he had adored, and who had insulted him as 
 though she had struck him with a knout, was the natural thirst 
 for loneliness of all wounded creatures. But he knew that this 
 desire, like so manj"^ others, was hopeless ; he could never leave 
 her or the world he lived in ; there were his children, who must 
 not be sacrificed, and the fortunes of others which must not ba 
 imperilled. He knew that he could no more undo the bands 
 fastened — many by his own hand — around him, than he could 
 sweep ten years off the sum of his past life. Such as his exist- 
 ence was now, so he had to continue it. 
 
 He walked to and fro the vast length of the chamber in the 
 quiet of the noonday. He felt as if her hand had struck him. 
 
 It had not been even an insult of unpremeditated passion,
 
 336 OTHMAR. 
 
 of hot anger, of inconsiderate haste— as such as he might have 
 X)ardoned it — but, serene and deliberate and measured, spoken 
 in cold blood, and matured on long consideration, it had been 
 such an outrage as severs the closest ties, and destroys the most 
 profound aSections, cuts at the deepest roots of self-respect, and 
 burns up all delicate fibres of sympathy. He would much 
 sooner have forgiven a dagger's thrust. 
 
 He had been insulted by the one person for whom he had 
 given up all his life, all his loyalty, all his devotion, all his 
 faith, and all his years to come. The outrage of her insolence, 
 of her disbelief, burned in his heart as the shame of a blow 
 buras on a brave man's foreliead. Never could he make her 
 believe, though he were to swear the trutli to her as he lay 
 dying! 
 
 That perfect silence with which she had listened and led him 
 on to speak, that perfect consciousness of all his actions ■which 
 had existed beneath her apparent ignorance, that feline attitude 
 of cold expectation and of watchful, motionless observation 
 with which she liad waited for the telling of a tale of which she 
 alreadj' knew every smallest detail : all these seemed to him 
 horrible, hateful, unnatural in a woman so near to him, so dear 
 to him, to whom he had given up his life, and whom he had 
 never wronged, or slighted, or betrayed. And then the es- 
 pionage ! — all his soul revolted at it. 
 
 ' One might have known that the weapon of a Russian 
 woman is always a spy ! ' he thought, with passionate indignation 
 at what seemed to him this last and lowest of afironts. 
 
 If he liad found in her any of the warm and fond, though 
 unwise, angers of that jealousy which loves whilst it hates, he 
 would have forgiven and comprehended it. But he could not 
 hope that there was any single pulse of it in her breast. She 
 had viewed and measured his actions Avith the accuracy and 
 coldness of a judge of court overwhelming any prisoner with his 
 logic, and had treated his own asseverations with utter and con- 
 temptuous disbelief, not deigning even to weigh as remotely 
 possible the chance that he might tell the truth. He himself 
 would have taken her word against that of the whole world, 
 against all evidence of his own senses, all adverse witness of 
 circumstance. 
 
 ' I was mad to suppose she ever cared for me,' he thought 
 bitterly, whilst the tears rose hotly in his eyes. 'For my 
 children slie cares, perhaps, but for me nothing : I have never 
 been wise enough, great enough, strong enough to compel even 
 lier respect. She looks on me as a mere dreamer, a mere fool. 
 All she is anxious for now is that the world may not have a 
 Bt(ny to laugh at, because it would lessen her dignity and offend 
 her pride ! ' 
 
 And yet ho loved her still as ho remembered her there
 
 OTHMAR. 337 
 
 sitting so still, so fair, with tlio cold challenge in her eyes, and 
 the pale roses at her breast ; and she was all his, and yet as far 
 off him as though she were queen in another world beyond the 
 sun ; and he loved her still, and was filled with guilty shame at 
 his own weakness, as men are when they still adore the women 
 who have defiled their name. 
 
 CHAPTER XLV. 
 
 For the first time in her wliole existence his wife had known 
 the mastery of a strong and uncontrollable impulse of emotion ; 
 for the first time since her dreamy eyes had smiled at the pains 
 and follies of men a wave of fierce and simple passion had passed 
 through her as the seismic wave moves tlie still earth. 
 
 She was touched with the common infirmity of common lives. 
 
 The women in her laundry rooms, tlie groom's wife who 
 lived above her horses' stables, might feel as she felt nov/. 
 Jealousy ! It could not be jealousy. Would Cleopatra have 
 been jealous of that slave from the market-place, that Nubian 
 seller of green figs, or Persian dancing girl ? 
 
 For jealousy it seemed to her there must first of all, be 
 equality. No — no : slie was not jealous ; she was only angered, 
 bitterly angered, because he had stooped to subterfuge and to 
 untruth : earths in which the fox of cowardice ahvays liides. It 
 was all ignoble, mean, unworthy, there was no manliness in it 
 and no honesty. Any common knave could have woven such a 
 net of falsehood and stupidity as this. 
 
 He liad thought to deceive her ! She could almost liave 
 laughed aloud at the idea ! — was there any brain subtle enough, 
 clear enough, wise enough in all Europe to invent a He ^vliicli 
 Avcukl have power to blind her ? Surely not ; and he knew it ; 
 and yet ho had thought such vulgar ordinary devices as have 
 served in half the vaudevilles of half the theatres of France 
 would serve to hoodwink and to satisfy her ! 
 
 There was a vulgarity in such miserable intrigue, which 
 offended her taste whilst it outraged her dignity. In all the 
 innumerable women of their own world could he not have found 
 some rival in some measure her equal 1 
 
 It might Jiave iiurt her more, but at least it would liave 
 insulted her less. 
 
 She remained alone and motionless, except for such feverish 
 mechanical action as that with which her right hand plucked the 
 roses from the bowl one by one and tore their hearts asunder. 
 
 She did not know she did it. She shed the sweet, faint- 
 smelling petals on the fioor, and her fingers had the movement 
 uf a great nervousness as they played with the loosened leaves. 
 
 z
 
 338 OTHMAR. 
 
 !N() one came there to disturb licr ; no one would dare to do so 
 until she rang ; the slow morning liours credit on, the very foot- 
 fall of time was muffled, and did not dare obtrude in these still 
 fragrant chambers where the air was heavy with hothouse heat, 
 and was sweet with a somnolent lily-like odoiu'. 
 
 She took the little written sheets from between the blotting- 
 paper and read what was written on them again. There was 
 more than she had read aloud to him. All the details of his 
 intercourse with Damaris Berarde were described there with 
 scarchinLC minuteness. She studied them aiiain and again. 
 Their bare records were full of suggestion to her ; they seemed 
 to tell so mucli which was not said in words, to be pregnant 
 with meaning and with cynical emphasis. 
 
 She sat still as any statue of a queen dethroned ; the pale 
 rose folds of the satin flowing about her feet, the ruin of pale 
 rose leaves on the floor before her. 
 
 All her life she had laughed at the love of men and derided 
 it, and starved it on graceful philosophies and ethereal conceits, 
 and dismissed it with airy banter and disbelieved its truest 
 words and its hardest pains : and now a love which she had 
 lost escaped her, and she found no comfort either in her wit or 
 in her scorn. 
 
 Certain of the words which he had said to her remained in 
 persistent echo on her ear. Some sense that she had been cold 
 to him and too capricious, and too negligent of what he felt, 
 came to her. It might even be that he had sought the warmth 
 of other afl'ections because she had left his heart empty herself. 
 He had always been a sentimentalist ! Had she not called hiui 
 Werther, Obermann, Rene, RoUa ? He had wanted the impos- 
 sible, the imnnitable, the eternal. 
 
 He had asked of love and of life what neither can give. 
 
 He had expected a moment of divinest rapture to be pro- 
 longed through a lifetime. 
 
 He had expected the song of the nightingale to tlirill through 
 the year. Senseless dreams and hopeless ! — but had she been 
 too cruel to tliem ? 
 
 For a moment her conscience spoke, and her heart relented 
 towards him. She remembered the many times wdien she had 
 treated the warmth of his passion as an absurd delirium or an 
 exaggerated sentiment, when she had again and again and 
 again bidden him take his erratic rhapsodies elsewhere than to 
 her. 
 
 If he had done so, was he so much to blame ? 
 
 Almost she coulil have pardoned him. If only he had not 
 lied to her she would have pardoned him. 
 
 ' Good God, why could he not be honest \ ' she thought, with 
 indignant scorn. ' Why could he not kncol at her feet, and lay 
 his head upon her knee and own his folly I Men were weak
 
 OTHMAR. 339 
 
 always, and so easily misled whenever their senses ruled them, 
 and such mere animals after all, even those in whom the mind 
 was strongest ! 
 
 'o^ 
 
 CHAPTER XLVI. 
 
 'Send the children to me,' she said when at last she rang for 
 her women, and the children came. They had come in from 
 their morning's ride on their small ponies in the Bois. They 
 were very pretty in their velvet riding dresses, with their golden 
 hair flowing over their shoulders ; they were very gentle and 
 had admirable manners ; the little boy with his cap in his hand 
 kissed his mother's fingers with an old-world grace. She drew 
 tliem both towards her. 
 
 ' il/es vdgnons,' she said, looking alternately at each of them, 
 ' I want you to tell me something quite honestly ; are you afraid 
 of me, either of you V 
 
 The young Otho, a very sensitive and chivalrous child, 
 coloured to his hair and was silent ; his sister Xenia, less timid 
 and more communicative, answered for him and for herself : 
 ' We are both of us — a little.' 
 
 The brows of Nadine contracted with a sudden sense of 
 pain. 
 
 ' Why ? ' she said imperiously. 
 
 The children did not reply ; their small faces grew serious ; 
 they were not prepared to analyse what they felt. 
 
 ' Do you mean,' she continued, ' that if you wished for any- 
 thing you would sooner ask your father for it than you would 
 ask me ] ' 
 
 The children nodded their heads silently. They had lost 
 their colour. She saw that the interrogation alarmed them. 
 
 ' Wliy 1 ' she repeated, in a softer tone. 
 
 Tliey were still silent ; they could not really tell ; they only 
 knew that a certain sense of timidity and awe was always upon 
 them in their mother's presence, that they never dared to laugh 
 too loudly or ask a question twice before her. They loved her, 
 and had the passionate admiration of childhood for that which 
 is above it and incomprehensible to it, and .^>he seemed to them 
 more wonderful and beautiful than any other living creature, 
 but there was a tinge of fear in their sense of her presence. 
 
 She read their unformed confused thoughts, and she felt a 
 sharp reproach in their tacit confession. 
 
 Had she been so engrossed in the ice of her egotism, that 
 she had never taken the trouble even to stoop and draw to her 
 these young hesitating half-opened souls ? 
 
 Had she been cold and careless even to thorn 1 
 Enfauts d'iimour, nes d'utic ctrciutc ! 
 
 Z 2 
 
 /
 
 340 OTHMAR. 
 
 she murmured as slie kissed them witli lips which trembled ; had 
 she been so little kind to them that even they feared her ? 
 
 ^ Maman etait prcte d pletirer,' murmured Xenia to her 
 brother in amazed awe, as with their arms wound about each 
 other thej^ passed down the corridor to their own apartments. 
 
 Otho drew a long breath. 
 
 ^ Elle nous a embrasses, vois-tn,' he murmured, 'comme on 
 emhrasse les petits pauvres ! ' 
 
 ' Les j)dits pauvres,'' whom he had seen in the Tuileries or 
 the Luxembourg gardens, kissed by their ragged mothers with 
 eager tenderness on cold winter mornings, when perhaps the 
 mothers had no food to give them except such fond caresses. 
 Watching those happy hungry children, he had said more 
 than once to his sister enviously, ' Si maman nous embrassait 
 comme fa .' ' 
 
 And then they had always kissed each other to make up for 
 the caresses which they did not obtain. 
 
 And now she too had kissed them ' comme ga ! ' They were 
 not sure whether they had done sometliing very wrong or 
 something very good to move her so ; one or the other they 
 were sure it must have been. 
 
 As tlie children went from her presence a note was brought 
 her which briefly announced that the Princess Lobow Gregori- 
 evna had arrived in Paris from Russia to consult some famous 
 physician. 
 
 'As the vulture comes when there is death in the air,' she 
 murmured with passion, as she tore the note in two. ]\Iust this 
 mummied saint even change all the habits of her life and quit 
 her country to be present here, when for the first time a rupture 
 open and iiTevocable had come between herself and Otlimar, 
 when in a few days' time, if it were not doing so already, all 
 Paris would be speaking of the cause of their disunion ! 
 
 All the vague dormant superstition which slumbered beneath 
 her sceptical intelligence, made her see a fatal omen in this 
 unlooked-for ai-rival of her bitterest enemy. Slore than once 
 she had said in her heart, ' If ever I liave misfortune, Lobow 
 Gregorievna will be there to triumph in it.' And now she was 
 there, within a few streets, residing in a religious house of 
 Muscovite nuns, a dark still austere spectre, which seemed to 
 her like the carrion bird which waits for those who die. 
 
 ' Do I grow nervous and hysterical ? ' slic asked herself in 
 scorn. 
 
 Slic who had meted out dosiinj' to so many, who had thought 
 that it was only tlie timid and foolish Avlio let life go ill witli 
 them, who liad regarded the .sorrows of sentiment and emotion 
 witli an indulgent contemi^t, felt with anger against herself tliat 
 such a trivial thing as the advent of a woman wlio hated her 
 could aflect her nerves and appear to lier a presage of ill. With
 
 OTHMAR. 341 
 
 lier delicate scorn and her consummate indificrence she had 
 turned aside all the efforts of others to move her or intluence 
 her ; she had never knov/n either apprehension or regret ; it 
 had always seemed to her that life was a comedy to be played ill 
 or well according as you were wise or stupid. Suddenly, for the 
 first time, emotions which were beyond her own control afi'ected 
 her, and a sense that circumstance escaped her guidance filled 
 her with the sharp pain of irritated impotence. 
 
 She knew the world too well not to know that all the women 
 who had vainly envied her, and many of the men who had vainly 
 wooed her, would take pleasure and find solace in every whisper 
 which should tell them of the offence to her pride ; and she knew 
 the w^orld too well not to know also that there is no such thing 
 as privacy in it, that all which she had learned through Michel 
 Obrenowitch society would lind out and gossip exaggerate ; and 
 that the whole of the society throughout Europe which she had 
 dominated and influenced and been feared by for so long, would 
 know that she — she — Nadege Feodorowna — was deserted for a 
 peasant girl taken from the streets. 
 
 All the imperious blood which was in her changed to fire as 
 she thought of the certain comments of the courts and drawing- 
 rooms in which she had been so long so arrogant a leader, so 
 dreaded a wit ; she knew that eagerly as hounds at the curee, 
 would all her flatterers, friends, and lovers join her foes in 
 exultantly rejoicing over her insulted dignity. 
 
 How many and many a time she had heard society laugh 
 over just such a story as this ! How well she knew all the cruel 
 derision, all the gay contempt, all the equivocal jests, all the 
 afiected pity ! How well she knew that precisely in measure to 
 the homage which they yield us is the pleasure of others in 
 our pain 
 
 I 
 
 CHAPTER XLVII. 
 
 Blanche de Laon that morning rode her English horse slowly 
 down one of the unfrequented roads in the Bois de Boulogne, 
 and beside her paced the handsome Tunisian mare of Loris 
 Loswa. They were good friends, although, or rather because, 
 they went for their loves and their vices elsewhere than to each 
 other. He was conscious of the use it was to him to be caressed 
 and favoured by this pre-eminent leader of la jeunesse crane ; 
 and she found in him a suppleness, a malice, and an ingenuity, 
 in tormenting and in defaming, which made him an ever amusing 
 and an often useful conqianion to a lady who had no better sport 
 than the harassing of her friends and acquaintances. 
 
 Loswa was acutely sensible of the necessity which exists for 
 any artist who would continue famous and fashionable to make
 
 342 OTHMAR. 
 
 his court to the new sovereigns of the great ■world, a,s turn by 
 turn they succeed to their leadership. The obligations of old 
 loyalties and the memories of old favours did not weigh a feather 
 with his wise and self-loving nature ; a Avoman's intluence was 
 the measure of her beauty in his eyes, and had Helen's self been 
 sur le retoitr she would have commanded no smile from him. 
 He saw in the Princesse de Laon an influence which would grow 
 Avith every fear for the next decade, so entirely were her qualities 
 those which her generation most admires and fears. Therefore 
 to no one was he in semblance more devoted, and no one had he 
 flattered more ingeniously, and immortalised more frequently 
 with all the most delicate homage of his art, though in his secret 
 thoughts he denounced as detestable the irregular colourless 
 impertinent features of her minois chiffviine, and her myosotis- 
 coloured insolent eyes which stared so arrogantly and so inquisi- 
 tively on all living tilings. 
 
 ' It is a vile type,' said Loswa in his own mind. ' It is a vile 
 type, all this jeunesse du monde. It is without grace and without 
 seduction ; it is insolent and noisy ; it is over-dressed and over- 
 drawn ; it screams and it gambles ; it wears the gowns of 
 Goldoni's Venice with the head-dresses of the Directoire ; it 
 empties the bazaars of Japan into its salons of Louis Quinze ; a 
 vile type, with nothing in it of the great lady, and nothing of 
 the honest woman, only a diahle d^entrain which carries it away 
 as a broomstick carries a witch ! ' 
 
 But, all the same, he was not willing to be left behind in the 
 excursions of the broomstick, and was very conscious that 
 unless cette jeunesse made him one of them, he would cease to 
 be the painter whom fashion loved. It is so easy to become 
 old-fashioned ! so easy to become one of that joyless and dis- 
 regarded band — ' les vieiix!' 
 
 Therefore to all the young beauties, even if he owned them 
 hideous, he was careful to pay devoted court, and to none more, 
 since none were so powerful as she, Ihan to Blanchette de Laon. 
 His last portrait of her was then upon his easel half finished ; a 
 study of pale tints, with her pale face seen above a necklace of 
 opals, with a great mass of lemon-coloured chrysanthemum 
 around and below, one of tliose dexterous and daring violations 
 of conventional art of which he possessed the secret ; and in it 
 he had flattered her so delicately, yet so immoderately, that her 
 vinscau de cliatte had become actually beautiful in his treatment 
 of it. 
 
 ' Tliat is what one wants Avhen one goes to be painted,' she 
 had said herself with cynical honesty. 
 
 She and he, good friends always and better friends still of 
 late, rode now side by side through the solitude of a rarely- used 
 alley of the Dois, and spoke in confidential tones together, as 
 her perfect figure in its dark cloth habit seemed one with the
 
 OTHMAR. 343 
 
 perfect English hunter Avhich she rode. Slie was not fond of 
 any country sports, but she rode admirably, and knew that 
 riding displayed all the graces of her form. 
 
 ' You are sure it is the girl of the island 1 ' she asked. 
 
 'Quite sure,' answered Loswa. 'Madame Nadege asked me 
 some questions, you gave me a hint, Lemberg spoke of some new 
 protegee of Rosselin's. I inquired about the theatres, at the 
 Conservatoire ; I imagined this hidden miracle was the future 
 Deselee of Bonaventure. I fotind out that she lived near INIagny, 
 and was visited by Othmar ; Magny is not the North Pole that 
 they should deem it unvisitable ; I went there unseen myself, 
 and a farm labourer pointed out to me "/a demoiselle:''^ she 
 was at a distance from me, walking by the river, but I recognised 
 her at a glance. One might have guessed it before. When she 
 disappeared from the island it was Othmar who knew where she 
 went.' 
 
 ' It is very droll ! ' said Blanchette, showing lier white small 
 teeth in a grin of genuine appreciation. ' And do you suppose 
 his Avife knows ? ' 
 
 ' Be'thune knows, by his look the other day, and he will tell her: 
 he will be only too glad dc lui donncr une doit against Othmar.' 
 
 ' I have told her something,' said Blanche de Laon ; ' though 
 I did not know who it was I knew that there was an interest at 
 Chevreuse ; I saw him walking in the fields there : but is the 
 girl truly a genius ? ' 
 
 Loswa smiled. 
 
 ' Who shall say ? But the cliere amie of a rich millionaire 
 Avill always find a public to swear that she is so. They already 
 speak amongst artists of her coming debut, and it is easy to see 
 the value which is attached to the millions behind her. There 
 is very little known about her, but that fact is known of Othmar's 
 interest in her, and no doubt it will make it easy for her to 
 appear on some great theatre.' 
 
 ' They say she is first to appear at Othmar's own house.' 
 
 ' That will be very clever, but very dangerous. Madame 
 Nadege is not a person with whom on peat plaisanter. I should 
 doubt her condescending to condonation of that kind.' 
 
 Blanchette laughed. 
 
 ' He is very indulgent to her about Bethune. He may 
 surely expect the usual equivalent in return.' 
 
 Loswa was irritated. 
 
 ' He knows well enough that Bethune is nothing to her ; 
 Be'thune has worshipped her for fifteen years. I admit that ; 
 but he has had his pains for his payment ; she lets him follow 
 her about, but it is only jMur rire.' 
 
 Blanchette laughed and flicked her horse's throat with her 
 little white switch. 
 
 ' You speak as if you rvere jealous ! You always admired
 
 344 OTHMAR. 
 
 that cold woman. To return to the coming Desclee. Paris 
 already talks of her, you say % ' 
 
 ' It is not my fault if it do not,' she thought, 
 
 ' Vaguely, yes,' answered Loswa. ' It has an expectation of 
 some new talent which has what all talent in our generation 
 requires : a prop of gold behind it.' 
 
 ' Have you discreetly whispered tliat it is one with the 
 original of a sketch of a fishing girl ? ' 
 
 Loswa smiled. 
 
 ' I have caused it to be whispered, of course ; we never say 
 those things ourselves.' 
 
 ' Where does Othmar hide her at present, do you say ? ' 
 
 ' At a farmhouse at Les Hameaux. He is not magnificent in 
 liis maintenance of her ; it is a very simple place, and she lives 
 very simjily there.' 
 
 ' That is just like a very rich man. Besides, Othmar always 
 has a taste for black bread and bare boards. You know at one 
 time he actually dreamed of breaking up the whole network of 
 the Othmar power, and stripping himself of everything, and 
 living like St. Vincent do Paul. That was before those children 
 were born ; their mother would certainly never take the vow of 
 poverty ! Well, shall you and I ride down to INIagny some 
 morning and see this prodigy of genius and simplicity ? You 
 can recall yourself to her, and you can present me. W^e will 
 represent ourselves as inspired "by what we have heard from 
 Ilosselin.' 
 
 Loswa hesitated. Othmar was not a man whom he cared to 
 cross. Yet he had a desire to see again the face which he had 
 sketched on Bonaventure, and he had a vague idea that by going 
 thither he might in some way learn something which would enable 
 him topay off that old score whichhe had so long cherished against 
 Othmar's wife. He had had a restless and hopeless passion for 
 her years before ; he had served and flattered her docilely be- 
 cause ho held at its just value the great power of her social 
 intiuence ; he had been of use to her in a thousand ways at her 
 chateau parties and in her Paris entertainments ; he had al- 
 ways been docile and devoted, and ingenious to please, and 
 submissive under offence, but all the same, at the bottom of his 
 heart there was a bitter rancour against her for her blindness to 
 his charms ; for her criticism of his talents ; for her constant 
 careless treatrnent of him as a mere decor de fete, as a mere 
 amateur ; and if lie could see her jn-ido hurt or her indiflcrenco 
 penetrated, lie felt that he would be happier and better satisfied. 
 A thousand slighting words which she had spoken out of ca- 
 price, and forgotten as soon as they were uttered, had remaiiu d 
 written on his memory and unforgiven. He would not have 
 quarrelled with her openly for liis^life ; he was too sensible of 
 the itleasure of lier ac(iuaintance, the charm of her presence, the
 
 OTHMAR. 345 
 
 value of her goodwill ; but if he could have helped unseen to put 
 any thorns under the rose leaves of her couch, he would have 
 done so willingly ; he would have even chosen thorns which 
 were poisoned. 
 
 ' Yes, ^we will go and see her,' said Blanchette, as their 
 horses paced under the boughs. ' It is always amusing to be 
 the first to inspect a person the world is going to be asked to 
 admire. On paut la dcnigrer si Men ! ' 
 
 ' But,' suggested Loswa, with hesitation, ' if we denigrer here, 
 we shall please Madame Nadege. Is that what you wish to do 1 
 I think if we go at all we must, on the contrary, go to befriend, 
 to admire, to assist the new talent.' 
 
 Blanche de Laon gave him a little approving caress with 
 her whip. 
 
 ' You are a clever man, Loris,' she said with appreciation. 
 'We will go to-morrow — no, the day after to-morrow,' she 
 added. ' I will meet you at St. Cyr ; the horses shall be sent 
 there by train ; I often send mine by train to places where 1 
 wish to ride ; send yours also. We will go early because it is a 
 long way. The day after to-morrow I know that Othmar will 
 be at Ferrieres ; there is a great breakfast ; he cannot escape 
 from it ; there will be no fear of meeting him in Chevreuse.' 
 
 'But are you sure what we shall accomplish when we reach 
 there 1 ' 
 
 ' You will finish the sketch begun on the island, and I shall 
 forestall the dramatic criticism of Francisque Sarcey.' 
 
 ' Othmar will not like it.' 
 
 ' Othmar need not know it. My dear Loris, do you suppose 
 that by feeding her on buttermilk, and hiding her under a 
 thatched roof, he secures the primitive virtues in his idealised 
 peasant 1 You may be sure she already tells him nothing that 
 she does not choose to tell. On ti' cat pas femme pour rien ! ' 
 
 Loswa rode on in silence awhile, then he said with a smile : 
 
 ' I have an idea, which, if we covUd realise it, might possibly 
 prove amusing. You will recollect that there are to be dramatic 
 representations at Amyot next week when the Princes are 
 there 1 ' 
 
 Blanchette nodded assent. 
 
 ' And Madame Nadege,' continued Loswa, ' is always very 
 solicitous for the success of her theatre ; she spares nuthing at 
 any time on that kind of entertainment ; and the representations 
 of next week are to be really royal ; all the greatest artists ara 
 engaged for them. I have always a good deal to do with 
 arranging these things for Amyot ; and I know that it is most 
 likely that the Ileichenberg, who is to jilay there, will not have 
 recovered the chill which she caught yesterday at La Marche. 
 If she should not, shall we substitute Damaris Berarde ? I need 
 not appear in the matter ; I can send the director of Amyot to
 
 346 OTHMAR. 
 
 Rosselin, and in ,iny way we should liave an entertaining scene 
 not included in the programme. If the new wonder succeed, 
 the Lady of Aniyot will not be pleased, and will undoubtedly 
 quarrel with her husband ; if, on the contrary, the girl should 
 turn nervous, or hysterical, or passionate, and forget her role, 
 it will be diverting enough, and in any case will embarrass 
 Otlimar himself. I tlunk in eitlier event we should have a droll 
 ten minutes.' 
 
 Blanche de Laon showed her white teeth in an approving 
 umile. 
 
 'You are always ingenious,' she said. ' But if Othmar be 
 already desirous of making the girl appear under his wife's 
 patronage, perhaps your scheme would only gratify him ? What 
 then ? ' 
 
 ' He is only desirous of that because he tliinks that his wife 
 does not know of Les Hameaux ; but we will take care that she 
 does know ; and I think slie may be trusted to resent it. She 
 does not care a straw for him, but she cares immeasurably for 
 her own dignity, her own influence, her own empire.' 
 
 Blanchette nodded again. 
 
 '_We will see what the new star is like, first,' she answered. 
 ' It is not a mere handsome nobody with a turn for the stage 
 who will excite her jealousy : she is too proud to be easily 
 jealous.' 
 
 'The girl is magnificent,' said Loswa, as he thought. 
 'Jealousy is always alive, even if love has been dead a centu°ry.' 
 
 CHAPTER XL VI II. 
 
 Tin; (lay after the morrow they kept their word to each other. 
 Sliu descended at the little station of St. Cyr, and found her 
 luir.se and groom and those of Loswa waiting for her. Loswa 
 and she bade their men stay at the station there, and rode them- 
 selves through the country ways which lie between St. Cyr and 
 Les ITamoaux. Tliat if anyone chanced to see them their meet- 
 ing would look like an assignation, did not trouble the thoughts 
 of the Princcsse de Laon for an instant ; there were far°too 
 many much more weighty imputations which she incurred daily 
 to allow so trivial a possible charge as this would be to have any 
 terrors for her. She delighted in the creation of scandal, in tlie 
 risks of equivocal positions ; and challenged both the admiration 
 of her liusband and the long-suHbring of her world with the most 
 daring and shameless of provocations. She knew that to those 
 who dare much, mucli is forgiven ; she knew that the world 
 Would never tpiarrel with her. It feared her tongue too greatly. 
 It was scarcely noonday when they reached the quiet liehla
 
 OTHMAR. 347 
 
 ■which stretched around the Croix Blanche. There were the 
 greenness and freshness of very earliest spring in all the land ; 
 little birds were flying and twittering, with thoughts of coming 
 nests, to be hidden away under orchard blossoms, and the sheep 
 were cheerfully croi:)ping the short grass which covered the ruins 
 of Port Royal. All these things and the memories winch went 
 with them said nothing to Blanchette ; all she knew of spring 
 was the dates of the various races, and all she knew of history 
 was that it gave you travesties for costume balls. 
 
 They left their horses in charge of a labouring servant, who 
 was sitting resting under one of the ash trees to eat his noonday 
 bread, and then, crossing the court-yard, pushed their way 
 without ceremony past the dairy-wench who tried to stop them 
 and learn their errand, and so, without either announcement or 
 apology, oj)ened the door at the head of the wooden stair and 
 found themselves in the chamber of Damaris. 
 
 She was sitting reading at a table, the white dogs lay at her 
 feet ; a great volume was open on the table before her, her head 
 leaned on her hand, which was hidden in the masses of her close- 
 curling hair. As she started at the unclosing of the door and rose 
 toiler feet, and restrained the dogs with a gesture, the intruders 
 upon her privacy were both astonished to see the development 
 which her beauty had taken since the night two years before 
 when she had stood, bewildered and astray, like a young niglit- 
 hawk brought into a lighted house from the shadows of niglit, 
 in the drawing-rooms of St. Pharamond. She did not speak ; 
 she remained motionless, her hand on the head of the male dog ; 
 she recognised Loswa instantly, with a sense of pain and of 
 regret that he had found her there ; his companion she was not 
 conscious of ever having seen before. 
 
 ' Here is Loris Loswa, whom you will remember, and I am 
 Madame de Laon,' said Blanchette, advancing towards her, 
 ■\\ ith her abrupt familiarity, her eyes roving all over the place 
 and coming back to fasten themselves with envy on the beauti- 
 ful lines of the girl's throat and bosom. 
 
 ' We are come to see you,' she continued, ' because you »vill 
 be a celebrity very soon ; Rossclin is going to bring you out at 
 the Fran^'ais or the Odoun ; you will have no trouble ; every- 
 thing is arranged ; Othmar's name is enough, and your story 
 will please Paris when it is in a romantic mood. It is romantic 
 sometimes, despite the naturalists. You are very handsome, 
 my dear, very ; you have an antique type, and what blood and 
 what health there are in you ! — enough to make a million of our 
 anemiques ! Why do you go on living in this hole among 
 pigeons and dogs ? I should have thought he would have given 
 you an hotel in the Avenue Josephine or the Boulevard Haus- 
 niann before now ! ' 
 
 Damaris looked at her from under bent brows ; she did not
 
 348 OTHMAR. 
 
 Trnderstand, but she had a sense of oflence in the way she was 
 addressed ; this great lady seemed to her rudely familiar, 
 brusquely intimate ; she did not like her t(Mie, hc'r face, Iier 
 manner ; and the use of Othmar's name bewildered her. She 
 was silent because she had no idea at all what she should reply. 
 
 Loswa tried to propitiate her. 
 
 ' I have not forgotten my day on the island,' he said to her, 
 * nor all your goodness to me. Ts it true that you are going to 
 dazzle all Paris in " Dona Sol " as you charmed us on that island 
 with "Esther"? Why does Rosselin delay to give the world 
 so much pleasure, and why does he keep you so hidden ? ' 
 
 Damaris heard with impatience and anger. 
 
 'I do not suppose 1 shall ever play Dona Sol,' she said 
 abruptly ; ' and if I did, most likely Paris would laugh, and you 
 first of all.' 
 
 ' Paris does not laugh at handsome people,' said Blanche de 
 Laon, cutting short the flattering protestations of Loswa. ' Not, 
 at least, till it gets tired of their good looks. But it is quite 
 true, is it not, that you are being taught by Rosselin to rival 
 Bernhardt ? ' 
 
 ' I do not know as to rivalry,' said Damaris, with consti'aint 
 and displeasure. ' If I ever follow art I shall endeavour to be 
 as true to it and as far from imitation of others as I can. M. 
 Bosselin is very kind and patient with me.' 
 
 Blanchotte smiled. 
 
 ' You are very grateful. Be sure he finds as much interest 
 in training you as you can find in being trained ! I should think 
 you might dispense witli study — with such a face as yours, and 
 such a friend as Otho Othmar ! ' 
 
 Damaris coloured angrily. 
 
 She resented the intrusion of this stranger, whose imperti- 
 nent and familiar manners offended her, and seemed to her a 
 personal insolence. At Loswa she did not look. His presence 
 was unwelcome to her, and brought back tlie memories of Bona- 
 venture so strongly that it was with difficulty that she kept tlie 
 tears from rising to her eyes. How far away it seemed, that 
 sunny noonday, when she had made him welcome to her little 
 balcony amongst the orange boughs and the lemon leaves ! And 
 then how basely he had repaid her and betrayed her, and 
 brought his friends to laugh at her, as he had brought this 
 woman of fashion now ! 
 
 Blancliette continued to gaze at her with unsparing examina- 
 tion, and Loswa continued to make to her those pretty speeclies 
 of graceful compliment of Avhich he was a finished master. Slio 
 grew angered and stul)born under the eye of the one and deaf 
 and contemptuous to the flatteries of the other. Why had tliey 
 come? WliL'U would they depart ? These wore the only two 
 questions in her thoughts.
 
 OTHMAR. 349 
 
 She -Wcas troubled, too, by the abrupt mention of Otlimar, 
 and uncertain what she ought to say, liow she should reply. If 
 only Ro;;selhi had been there ! He would have known how 
 to meet these insolent gay people, who stared at her as though 
 she were some curious strange beast ; he would have stood 
 between her and their persistent inquisitive examination. But 
 the visit of Rosselin had been paid on the previous day, and he 
 would not return until the morrow. The woman of the house 
 was at the market of Versailles ; she was wholly alone ; and 
 she had lost the dauntless, careless courage with which she had 
 treated Loswa on the island, the courage born of childish igno- 
 rance and of childish audacity. Life seemed now very dithcult 
 and intricate to her, and her steps in it were shy and unsure. 
 
 ' If I ever do go before the world I shall probably fail,' she 
 said wearily, in answer to their continued allusions to her 
 coming career. 
 
 ' Fail ! ' echoed Blanche de Laon, breaking in roughly on 
 the graceful protestations of Loswa. ' You will not fail, you 
 shall not fail; it would please her too much. Bamel how 
 unlike you are to us ! You look as if you were made of some 
 other stuff than we are made of ; you look as if you had come 
 fresh out of the sea like the Greek goddess that is in the Salon 
 eveiy year. Has she seen you again ? You ought to let her 
 see you now.' 
 
 ' Who 1 ' said Damaris. 
 
 ' Who ] ' said Blanchette, and muttered in her small white 
 teeth ^ Ah ! gafait Vinnocente, ga sepose! 
 
 Aloud she said to her companion, ' My dear Loswa, go and 
 sketch the nymphs of the farm ; there are always nymphs on 
 a farm, are there not ? I want to be alone a moment with 
 Mademoiselle Berarde. AUez-vous-en ! ' 
 
 As he obeyed her unwillingly and with a look of eloquent 
 regret, Blanchette scanned with all the penetration of her pale 
 keen eyes the poetic and classic face of Damaris ; she was a 
 skilled appraiser of female beauty, and there were a force, a 
 colour, an ideality here which she had never seen before, which 
 were as unlike the beauties of the women of her own world, 
 washed with lalt d'lris and shadowed with kolh, as a warm 
 morning on southern fields, where the sun shines on Avine-hued 
 Avind flowers, is unlike a waxlit evening in a conservatory. 
 
 ' Paris has had nothing like her for ages,' she thouglit. 
 * But she is stupid ; she does not know her own power ; she 
 lives on at a farm ; if she waits for Othmars leave she will never 
 bo seen by the world ; she does not understand ; perhaps she 
 mixes sentiment up with it ; she has the head of a .Sapplio ; 
 that type is always romantic' 
 
 'Now he is gone,' she said aloud. ' Do not be afraid and
 
 350 OTHMAR. 
 
 do not jJ05e. Tell me truly, lias Othmar's wife seen you since 
 you left your island ? ' 
 
 ' No.' Damaris coloured at the name. 
 
 ' No ? What a pity ! Look you, my dear,' she continued, 
 as she leaned familiarly towards her and poured the sharp pale 
 rays of her penetrating eyes into the face of Damaris. ' I will 
 befriend you because you hate her. She had power once, but 
 now I have more than she had. Lc jour est aux jennes. I will 
 use my power for you. You shall become great if my world 
 can make you so, because slie will sutler in seeing it. You 
 must be great, I tell you ; it is all very well to Jiler le parfait 
 amour with him under these trees if you like it — I wonder you 
 like it, it is such waste of time, and you should have had your 
 hotel and your major-domo, and your blood-horses by now, 
 and men never think much of a woman for whom they do little ; 
 it is the woman they are ruined by whom they esteem ;— but 
 you must be great, you must shine, you must set all Paris talk- 
 ing or you will not hurt her in the least. I do not think she 
 cares what afiairs he may have, all that is beneath her ; she will 
 only care if you can oppose her de jniissance a puissance, if the 
 world admires you, adores you, and flatters him and insults her 
 every time that it praises you. Do you understand ? I do not 
 think you understand. Are you stupid or do you only pose ? 
 Do not feign with me. Why should you feign with me ? All 
 that serves nothing. You only hurt yourself and lose influence 
 if you let him think you are content to be shut up like this, 
 adoring his image. You are one of the sentimentalists I see ; 
 you must change all that. It is not of om* time, it is not in our 
 manners ; it is silly and provincial, and you may be sure does 
 you no good with him. Let Rosselin bring you out on any 
 theatre he can, any is better than none ; but with Othmar 
 beliind him he will be able to buy all the theatres in Paris. 
 You are magnificent to look at ; they say you have talent, and 
 you have a lover who is a Crcesus ; it will be your own fault if 
 you are not the admiration of all Europe at a bound. Then she 
 will liate you, and she will be wounded to the soul, and she will 
 realise that her day is done ; lc jour est aux jeuncs. And then 
 I will kiss you on both cheeks before all Paris if you like. 
 Yes — I, even I — Blanche de Vannes, Princesse de Laon ! ' 
 
 Her voice had risen into a swift enthusiasm, a faint ilush had 
 come (m her pale features, she smiled with pleasure at the 
 vision her words conjured up ; her cold narrow world-encrusted 
 soul expanded with the sweetness of a satisfied hatred and the 
 h(mesty of a genuine sentiment. Love she could not, but she 
 cnuld hate, and in all the cruelty and the wickedness of her 
 there was tlius much of candour and of feeling ; she was true to 
 the childish atiections and the promised revenge of a day long 
 ^onc by. Even as she spoke she was thinking of the poor little
 
 OTHMAR. 351 
 
 verses hidden with the dead roses in the drawer at Amyut ; 
 even as she spoke slie was saying in her lieart, ' My pure angel, 
 I do not forget ; better people than I forget, but I do not. 
 She shall sufler what you suffered ; she shall lose what you lost ; 
 she shall feel that she is the laugh of the world ; she shall know- 
 that she is as x^owerless to hold the heart of her husband as 
 you were, and she shall see him chained in public to the 
 triumphal car of this child. And I shall be by the child's 
 car, and I shall tell her all the secrets of power and all the vices 
 that make men like sheep to be driven, and I shall make her 
 dupe him and deceive him, and keep other lovers on his gold, 
 and ruin him body and soul ; and no one will know I am there 
 behind her but myself. I shall know, and what a jest it will be ! ' 
 
 All these thoughts floated before her while her hands clasped 
 the ivory handled white whip and her eyes flashed their pale 
 fires over the face of Damaris. 
 
 To tempt, to corrupt, to revenge : thej' are a triad sweeter 
 to those who love them than are ever all the Graces and 
 Persuasion, or Charity and her gentle sisters. 
 
 Damaris still did not speak. The colom- was hot in her face 
 and her eyebrows were drawn together ; a look of intense 
 sufiering had replaced the momentary stupor of bewilderment 
 and surprise ; she breathed loudly and slowly with effort ; the 
 blue veins of her throat were swollen. Little by little she had 
 gathered up the sense of all which had been said to her, and 
 ravelled it out bit by bit, and comprehended it. 
 
 The swift shi'ill voice of her temptress still went on in her 
 ear. 
 
 ' Perhaps you wonder what business it is of mine, why I 
 mix myself up in it, wiiy I care what your lover does. Well, I 
 care nothing at all for him ; he may have a harem as large as 
 Versailles for aught I care, but I hate her ; I have always hated 
 her. She is insolent, she is arrogant, she has that power over 
 men still which it irritates one to see, and she killed my cousin. 
 You may have heard of Othmar's first wife and of her death. I 
 was fond of my cousin ; she was of a type so rare — so rare ! — • 
 one that one never sees now ; she was only a child, and she took 
 her own life because Othmar loved this woman who is his wife 
 now ; she thought she would make him happy in that way — poor 
 little sweet generous fool ! So she died by the sea there, in that 
 country of yours. I was sorry then ; I am angry still ; I have 
 always said that I would live to see this other woman humiliated 
 and abandoned as she was humiliated and abandoned. And 
 that is why I will be your friend ; openly, freely, I cannot be so, 
 but I will do all I can in my world to make you great, and I can 
 do a great deal, because great you must be. She will not care 
 if he only make love to you d la derohee under these ash trees. 
 You are nothing now ; you are only a little peasant whom it has
 
 352 OTHMAR. 
 
 pleased hitn to set in a dovecot — it does not matter to her even 
 if she knows of it. But, if you triumph in the siglit of all Paris, 
 then it Avill -wound her. If you be a second Desclee as she 
 prophesied for you, so Loris says, then it will make her bitterly 
 mortified if she sees herself deserted for you.' 
 
 She paused to take breath after the rapid, voluble, unstudied 
 sentences wdiich had followed each other so fast and in so im- 
 pressive a whisper ofT her lips. 
 
 Daiuaris made no word in reply. She listened as though 
 she were made of wood or stone ; her full curved lips were 
 pressed close together, her eyes were sombre and had a dusky 
 ominous gleam in them, tlic only expression on her face was 
 that of a vague, half-stupid bewilderment which left her com- 
 l^anion in the same doubt as before, as to whether she were 
 stujiid or feigning. 
 
 'If she liave no more intelligence than this,' Blanche do 
 Laon thouglit, iuijiatiently, ' how can they think to make her 
 famous for all her beauty \ To be sure, great artists are some- 
 times great imbeciles.' 
 
 She leaned still nearer till her eyes seemed to plunge them- 
 selves into those of Damaris ; she had drawn off her gloves, 
 and her thin small hands with their glittering rings were clasjied 
 on her riding whip where it lay on tlie table in front of her ; her 
 voice rose swifter and shriller as she resumed her argument. 
 
 ' You do not understand your own forces,' she said, with the 
 impatience of a keen intelligence baffled by a slow one. ' You 
 do not see that now — now — now is the moment for you to do 
 everything you choose, to get everytliing you wish ; if you let 
 time go by, Othniar will refuse you a piece of pinchbeck wliere 
 now he would give you a river of diamonds. If you waste your 
 best years living in obscurity to please liim, he will reconipenss 
 you by leaving you to obscurity all the rest of your days. ]\Ien 
 never appreciate sacrifice. If lie cannot do better for you tlian 
 a room or two in a farmhouse, what use is it to you that lie is 
 worth millions (;f millions as he is / You are only a liandsome 
 child, only a handsome peasant ; but if j-ou come into the world 
 you will be a beautiful woman. You will lead men any way 
 you like, and he will love you all the more because lie will be 
 afraid of his rivals.' 
 
 Suddenly she rose and stood erect. 
 
 'I know what you mean,' she answered, with the vibration 
 of a great passion in lier voice 'At first I did not know. I 
 think you cannot imderstand. He saved me from the streets, 
 as a man may a dog. He has been as an angel to me. He does 
 not care f(n- me except in pity. He loves her. I would give 
 my body and my soul to liim if he wislied for them. But he 
 does not. Ho is not mine in any way, nor will he ever be. 
 You do not understand. If I cnuld make him ha2)py for one
 
 OTHMAR. 353 
 
 hour I would burn in hell for all eternity with joy. But I have 
 not the power. I am nothing to him, nothing ; no more than 
 the world is to me. You do not understand — go, go.' 
 
 Her voice lost its intensity of expression, and sank exhausted 
 at the close ; the colour faded from her face ; she leaned against 
 the wall with a sense of sudden weakness on her. 
 - Blanche de Laon stared on her with hard unsympathetic 
 Bceptical eyes ; she laughed a little, coarsely, rudely. 
 
 ' Dame, ! You have a mind to show me you can act ! If 
 you were on the boards now you would bring down the house. 
 You are no simpleton I see. No doubt you know the roU 
 which pays you best. I spoke to you in sincerity, and you 
 answer me with a tissue of untruths. (Pest bien du midi ga ! ' 
 
 Damaris looked at her wearily : the pain in her was too great 
 for anger to have any place in it. 
 
 ' You can believe what you like,' she said with eflbrt. 
 *Go!' 
 
 Blanche de Laon, who had never in her life known any im- 
 pulse of submission or any sense of fear, was vaguely awed and 
 touched into involuntary acquiescence. Her swift, ready, in- 
 solent, and cruel tongue was silent. 
 
 She was l)affled and angered. She had spoken so frankly 
 and so cynically, because she had been certain that her words 
 would fall on a willing ear, and be received by a mind open and 
 ready for them. The i:)Ossibility that Damaris might refuse to 
 hearken to them had never presented itself to her. She had 
 made the usual mistake of an ignoble mind. The possibility of 
 a mind being noble had never suggested itself to her. 
 
 She was sure that Otlimar was the lover of this child, and 
 that the girl denied it to save him from all comment of the 
 world, and all jealousy of his wife. 
 
 Such a denial was stupid and exaggerated, and unwise, 
 because the force of all women lies in their power to make 
 themselves feared, and in their unblushing employment and 
 proclamation of their triumphs : still it was fine, even Blanche 
 de Laon felt that. She did not for a moment beUeve the answer 
 given her, and she was bitterly incensed at the rejection of all 
 her overtures and the failure of all her counsels ; but she was 
 moved despite herself to a certain unwilling admiration of so 
 much courage and of so much loyalty. It was a lie she felt 
 sure ; but there were a grandeur and utter oblivion of self 
 in such a lie which impressed her by their utter unlikeness to 
 herself. 
 
 She looked at the averted face of Damaris ; then gathered 
 up her gloves and whip, and without any other words went from 
 the chamber. 
 
 ' May I not go back to make my adieux?' asked Loswa, who 
 waited for her in the couityard of the house. 
 
 A A
 
 354 OTHMAR. 
 
 ' No,' she said sharply. ' What should you do there ? You 
 are no student of the antique. That child is a daughter of the 
 gods— a sister of Phsedra and of Medea— no contemporary of 
 yours or mine. Let her alone. She will not suit your canvas. 
 
 ' Will she play at Amyot? ' 
 
 ' I do not think so.' 
 
 She mounted her horse and rode in silence through the fields 
 and lanes. Her tireless incessant voice for once was mute, and 
 her face was troubled and surprised. All the malice and the 
 vileness which had been in her thoughts, her hopes, her sugges- 
 tions, had been scared and confounded by the sense of a great 
 unintelligible passion, the nobility of which was incomprehen- 
 sible to her, yet affected her with a dim sense of its strength 
 and its strangeness. 
 
 Once she laughed aloud and turned to Loswa. 
 
 ' Desclee ! Desclee never equalled Damaris Berarde. What 
 an incomparable actress the future will enjoy whether we get 
 her to Amyot or not ! ' 
 
 ' You mean ' asked Loswa perplexed. 
 
 ' My dear Loris ! Almost she persuaded me that she loves 
 Otho Othmar for himself and not for his millions ! Almost she 
 persuaded me too that he is not as yet her lover, though he 
 may be when he will ! You will grant that she surpasses 
 Desclee.' 
 
 CHAPTER XLIX. 
 
 When the echo of their horses' feet had ceased from the stones 
 of the courtyard, and the quiet air had no sound in it except the 
 twitter of the sparrows pecking among the food of the poultry in 
 the yard below, Damaris remained motionless, leaning against 
 the wall of the chamber. One by one all the words wliich Jiad 
 been spoken to her returned on her memory, bringing with 
 them a clearer meaning, a fuller comprehension, a deeper 
 disgust. 
 
 Little by little she understood all which Blanche de Laon 
 had meant, all which she had promised, all which she had 
 supposed. 
 
 ' Tlicy think that I live on his money, and that all I care for 
 is that,' she muttered with the sick sense of a loathsome impu- 
 tation stealing all the strength out of her nerves, and all the 
 peace out of her life. 
 
 Othmar to her was as a deity. But the very exaltation and 
 intensity and ideality of tliu i)as.siun which moved her for him, 
 rendered all the coarse suggestions and conclusions of this woman 
 of fashion most intolerable to her, most cruel, and most degrad-
 
 OTHMAR. 
 
 .•>:>'. 
 
 ing. Because she would have follo^ved him to any fate with joy 
 and with devotion, therefore was she most tortured, most out- 
 raged, by the supposition that she could regard him as the 
 means to riches and to fame. Notliing on earth sutlers so in- 
 tensely as a loyal and lofty passion, which sees itself classed with 
 venal and avaricious lusts. 
 
 Perhaps even he himself might suspect her of some such vile 
 hopes as these ! 
 
 She leaned rtgainst the wall, sick at heart in her utter soli- 
 tude, her lips white, her brow red with dusky colour, her 
 breathing slow and loud, her limbs cold. The white dogs 
 watched her with wistful eyes as they had once watched her 
 little boat go away over the moonlit sea. The morning crept 
 onward, the pale sunbeams strayed across the floor, amorous 
 pigeons cooed in their little homes under the eaves, distant 
 voices of labourers, calling one to another, came through the 
 stillness ; there was the sound of the strokes of an axe in the 
 copse. 
 
 She was conscious of nothing. 
 
 An hour and more passed uncounted by her, when the step 
 of Rosselin, still so firm and so light, mounted rapidly the 
 wooden stairs and his voice called gaily to her before he had 
 reached the door of her chamber. 
 
 ' My child, where are you % I have great news for you. You 
 had no expectation of a visit from me to-day. I have great 
 news for you, my dear ; it would not brook delays ; the Fates 
 have sent us the very chance we wanted, there is always a <h:a 
 Fortuna for genius, the very stars fight in tlieir courses for 
 it ' 
 
 His gay and excited voice dropped suddenly, for his eyes 
 caught sight of her leaning against the wall of the room, where 
 she liad stood during the last words spoken by Blanche de Laon. 
 She turned her head and louked at him, but uitliout much re- 
 cognition in the look, her face was suffused with dark colour, 
 she had an expression in her eyes, stunned, disgusted, bewildered, 
 and yet one of intense anger. 
 
 ' Who has been with you 1 ' said Pi.osselin, abruptly. ' What 
 have they Aone to you ? ' 
 
 She did not reply. 
 
 Rosselin repeated his question impatiently. 
 
 ' Have you not trust enough in me to speak ? You look as 
 if you had seen ghosts. Good God ! what has happened to you ] 
 Child, cannot you answer me ? ' 
 
 'There is nothing to say,' she replied slowly. Not for the 
 universe coald she have repeated what she had heard. 
 
 'Nothing to say ! and you have lost faith in me in a night! 
 I left you as usual yesterday. You havebeen graver, shyer, 
 stiller of late it is true, but you have never been like this. I 
 
 A A 2
 
 JO"- 
 
 OTHMAR. 
 
 camo to tell yoit of a great chance. Tliere may be no more god a 
 for the vulgar, for aught I know, but there is a divine providence 
 still for genius ! Mdlle. Reichenberg is ill from cold ; she was 
 to play in the great theatricals at Amyot. Louis Loswa, who 
 directs them as he always does, has just sent to me to suggest 
 that you should take her place in two scenes from the "Misan- 
 thrope." He says that Othmar suggested it ; that he wishes 
 his wife to see you there. You are letter perfect, I say, in the 
 part of Ce'liraene, you have recited it so many times with me. 
 True you have never played on any stage, but I am not afraid 
 of you if you will be courageous, if you will speak as you speak 
 when we are alone. Child, you have genius. What is the iise 
 of having it if you are dumb as the stocks and stones ? Why do 
 you look so ? What has happened to you since I left you ? ' 
 
 Damaris stared at him with dilated eyes. 
 
 ' Amyot ! ' she repeated. 
 
 'Yes, Amyot,' said Rosselin angrily. 'The great country 
 house of Othmar. It is what I always most desired. It will be 
 the finest dehut you can have, and will, perhaps, stay evil 
 tongues. You have said that you would be dumb if you stood 
 before her, but that pusillanimity is wholly unworthy of you. 
 What is she to you ! A woman who once predicted fame for 
 you. Show her that she predicted aright. You can succeed if 
 you choose. Succeed then, to do honour to me and justice to 
 yourself ' 
 
 She did not reply. 
 
 ' Cannot you trust me to know what is best for you ? ' said 
 Rosselin, still with anger and upbraiding. ' I have arranged 
 everything. Y'ou will go doAvn to Beangency to-night Avith mo ; 
 rest one day, rehearse twice or thrice there, and on the next 
 play the part at Amyot. It will be perfectly easy. You are 
 neither weak nor nervous, though you are imprt- ssionablc and 
 take strange loves and hatreds. All is arranged ; I have your 
 costumes ordered ; the people who will act with you are all my 
 friends, and will aid you in every way. God in heaven ! What 
 can you hesitate for ? What can you want ? At your ago had 
 I had such an ojiportunity to take my place at a bound on 
 the highest steps of French art I should have gone mad with 
 
 Damaris was silent. Her face was in shadow and he could 
 not see its expressi(jn. 
 
 ' Does he wish it, you say ? ' she asked in a low voice. 
 
 ' Otlimar ? Yes, I believe so. He gave his permission for 
 such a presentation of j-on to liis wife montlis ago ; lie will be 
 present, and he will certainly be glad to see your triumph. He 
 knows well that there is no other life possible for you. You 
 cannot go back to the life you left ; you will not be content 
 with the paths of obscurity ; you have touched the enchanted
 
 OTHMAR. 357 
 
 cup and you must go on to drink of it, whether you will ox no. 
 There are a score of reasons, which it is not necessary to detail, 
 why it is much to be desired that you should be seen first at 
 Amyot, beyond all other places. I think you should trust me. 
 ] am not likely to mislead you after having passed so many 
 months in striving to develop the talents Nature has given you. 
 Your natural gifts are great ; if you do not throw them away in 
 a passion of mistaken feelings or of childish despair you may 
 live to reign in France as a woman of genius can reign in no 
 other country in the world. You make me angry to see you 
 so — Othmar's wife ! What is Othmar's wife to you that you 
 should fret your soul for her % What matter to you, child, are 
 your own gifts, your own future, your own victory % Love Art 
 and follow it. It will be more faithful to you than any lover 
 that lives ! ' 
 
 She still did not reply. 
 
 He grew impatient and indignant witli her. He had the 
 conviction which is so sincere in a great artist, that all passions, 
 aifections, joys, woes and desires, loves and hatreds, were of no 
 weight whatever put in the scale with Art and with renown. 
 He had given up his whole existence to Art, and now that he 
 was old his devotion to it had remained in him whilst he had 
 forgotten the force and the despair of the afiections and of the 
 passions when they govern the early years of life. 
 
 It seemed to him intolerable, jincredible, that the mere 
 weight and sway of Othmar's memory should stand for a moment 
 in the same scale with her as her destiny in the world, her 
 place in fame. As a youth he himself had swept away all the 
 flowers of feeling whenever they had threatened to choke the 
 growing laurel of his genius : why could she not do the same % 
 Was it because she was weak with the weakness of women \ 
 
 After love there is nothing so cruel as the tyrannies of art, 
 and Rosselin was art incarnated. Moreover he believed in tho 
 magnetism and vivifying force of unexpected events and of 
 sudden emotions. They were a portion of those drastic and 
 searching medicines with which he thought an imperfectly de- 
 veloped genius needs treatment. Once he had wished and 
 wished sincerely that Damaris Berarde should remain in the 
 cool and shady paths of private life ; but he had long ceased to 
 wish it ; he was impatient for the Avorld to crown the novitiate 
 on which he had bestowed so much care and labour. 
 
 The thought of the fetes at Amyot captivated and stimulated 
 his own imagination. They seemed to him the occasion she 
 most needed ; a very frame of Renaissance carvings, in which 
 the porti'ait of Celimene as portrayed by Damaris would show 
 in its finest colours and its finest lines. He dreaded for her the 
 coarse and ugly trivialities of a theatre with its throng of actors, 
 its imperious direction, its hired applause, its niggard criticisms ;
 
 358 OTHMAR. 
 
 he feared that she would feel in it like a hind caught in the 
 toils, would rebel against it all and flee. But at Amyot it would 
 be pure art which would claim her, refined praise which Avould 
 salute her, an atmosphere of delicacy, of culture, of magnificence 
 which would be about her. If such a scene and such a stimulant 
 Avould not arouse all the soul slumbering in her, then he thought 
 that he would be ready t(j confess : ' I mistake ; she has no 
 genius ; let her go and till the earth and reap its fruits ; of the 
 fruits of art she shall have none.' 
 
 If she failed in such an air with such an opportunity, he 
 thought that he could be as cruel to her as Garcia was to Mali- 
 bran when her Desdemona was too timid and too tame. 
 
 ' I want you to be seen at Amyot,' he said once more, with 
 irritation at being foi'ced to explain. ' Othmar's friendship for 
 you is only an injury unless you have his wife's countenance too. 
 You can feel for her what aversion you will, but you must be 
 seen by the world in her presence : then she can do you no 
 harm. You are too ignorant and too young to see the perils in 
 your path, but I see them. I will save you from them if you 
 will be guided by me. If you are afraid to act, if you are un- 
 willing to be with the others, they must find some other sub- 
 stitute for Reichenberg ; there are many eager enough to replace 
 her ; and you yourself shall only say some legend in verse, 
 some monologue, some simple poem, the "Revolte des Fleurs" 
 or the "Vase et I'Oiseau ;" anything will do; you will be 
 heard, you will be seen, you will be known to have recited on 
 the stage at Amyot ; it will suflice.' 
 
 He did not add that he expected so much from the charm of 
 her voice and from the beaut}' of her face that the slightest 
 cause which sliould aff'ord a reason for her being seen by the 
 great world would, in his anticipations, suffice to give her a 
 place in its admiration, and rank in its realms of Art. 
 
 'Come,' he said imperiously, 'there is little time to lose. 
 We must reach Beaugency to-morrow in the forenoon. All the 
 rest are already there. You must relicarse with them thrice at 
 the least, for you have none of the habits of the stage, though I 
 think they will come to you easily ; I have taught you all there 
 really is to know. Come : why do you stand like that % Have j'ou 
 been moon-struck or sun-struck since I saw you the day before 
 yesterday ? You have an opportunity given you for which you 
 should go on your knees with thanksgiving, and you look as 
 though you were doomed to your death I Oh, child, Avhat did 
 I tell you the other day ? If tlie liate of this woman be in your 
 soul, let it s])ur you on to great efforts, let it move j'ou to high 
 endeavours, let it force lier to own tliat you are dowered by 
 nature with wliat she has not. Hate is an ignoble thing, and I 
 do not tliink it tlie parent of noble actions, but if you cannot 
 cast it out of your breast, com2)el it to inspire you nobly. STou
 
 OTHMAR. 359 
 
 have wished for the world's applause, for the solace of art, for 
 the joys of moving the minds of multitudes : all these may 
 become yours, if you choose. But not if you consume your soul 
 in vain passions.' 
 
 The face of Damaris grew duskily red. She knew his 
 meaning. 
 
 ' I cannot play at Amyot,' she said slowly. ' Do not ask me, 
 I cannot. I should disgrace you. My tongue would cleave to 
 my mouth. You would curse me.' 
 
 ' Gi'eat God !' cried Rosselin, furious and amazed. 'Be- 
 cause that one woman has such terror for you ? ' 
 
 ' Not that, ' said Damaris. 
 
 She was mute some moments, the blue veins swelled in her 
 throat, a mist of tears gathered hastily in her eyes. 
 
 ' I was starving and he fed me, I was friendless and he be- 
 friended me. He shall not think that I look on his kindness as 
 a mere stairway to climb by to fame and the ways of the world. 
 His wife and his friends shall not say that I am made by his 
 gold and sustained by his influence ; a mere thing of selfish, 
 covetous, ambitious, mercenary greed — like so many, many 
 women — so they say. I did not understand ; now I have 
 thought — and I do understand. You are angry and I must 
 seem thankless. But I will never go upon the stage — never — 
 never — never — because his wife and his world, and perhaps his 
 own thoughts, would always tell him that all I cared for was the 
 help he could give me, the reflection his wealth could cast on 
 me. I never saw it like that before, but now that I have seen 
 it so, once, I cannot go back into Ijlindness.' 
 
 The tears rolled slowly from her eyes down the burning 
 crimson of her cheeks ; her voice was lost in one great sob. 
 Rosselin seized her arm with a violent gesture. 
 
 ' Who has been with you % ' he said, fiercely. ' Who has 
 dared to spit on you the venom of the world's lying mouth % ' 
 
 ' I have thought it out all myself. Before I did not know,' 
 she answered briefly, and more than that he could not force 
 from her. 
 
 She could not have told him the temptations and the sug- 
 gestions made by Blanche de Laon to save her life. All their 
 shamefulness had burnt into her very soul, as vitriol burns the 
 flesh. 
 
 He stayed with her till night had fallen, and urged, implored, 
 commanded, persuaded, entreated her, with all the might of 
 that golden speech of which he was master. But it was all in 
 vain. The rocks of her own island were not more deeply rooted 
 in their deep-sea bed, than was her immovable purpose— never 
 to try and force her way into the world's publicity. 
 
 ' Do you mean to say,' he asked, with incredulity and despair, 
 ' that you give up all idea of a dramatic career ? '
 
 36o OTHMAR. 
 
 She made a sign of assent. 
 
 ' You cannot know what you do,' he cried in amazement and 
 indignation. ' You have gifts which are not given to many. 
 Do you mean to say that you will let all these lie and rust 
 becaiise of some sentimental fancy which has rooted itself 
 against all reason in your mind ? Your objections are absurd. 
 They are the morbid, exaggerated feelings of a child who has 
 lived too much alone, and knows nothing of the world excei:)t 
 what books can tell. What has Othmar to do with it either 
 way ? If it be a sacrifice made for him he will not care for it. 
 He has been kind to you ; he is kind to half a million people ; 
 but your future is nothing to him, except as he wishes you well, 
 assuredly he wishes you well, and the more success and happi- 
 ness you gain the less remorse Avill he feel that he and his broke 
 up your life in the south. Oh, my child, my dear, be wise 
 while it is time. The world is all before you, do not take 
 a false step on its very threshold. The gods are seldom bene- 
 volent ; if we refuse the good that they would do us, they leave 
 us alone ever afterwards. They will never return to ingrates.' 
 
 She was silent ; but by the look upon her face he saw that 
 he had not altered her resolve. 
 
 ' I seem to speak harshly no doubt,' he pursued, ' for you 
 cannot see in my heart, and for the first time since I have known 
 you, you refuse to believe in my judgment. I tell you that 
 your idea Is absurd, that Othmar will never attribute to you 
 the motives you fancy ; he is too wise and too generous, and no 
 one could look at you, child, and think of you an ignoble thing. 
 You may be a great artist if you choose. If j'ou are not that, 
 you will be of all creatures the most wretched, for you will live 
 against all the instincts of your nature, against all the bend of 
 your mind. What made yon, when you read your poets on 
 your island, dream of a life wholly unknown to you, if not the 
 forces of genius which made you dissatisfied where you were, 
 and cried to you " Go." Fate has been kind to you : it has set 
 open the door ; it has left you free. If you arc thankless and 
 refuse what it offers, you M'ill deserve to perish in misery.' 
 
 She was still quite silent. 
 
 ' But what will become of you ? ' he cried in his amazement 
 and his grief. ' Child, you are so young, you cannot pass all 
 your life living down all the vital jiowcrs that are in j'OU. 
 Genius struggles like a child in the womb to force its way out 
 to light. You cannot go against your nature. What will you 
 do ? What will you do ? 'We have made you for ever unlit foi 
 the existence to which you were born. If 3'ou do not go and 
 sit where Fame beckons you iioav, you will stay out in the cold, 
 friendless and homeless for life. Have I not told you so 
 before ? There is nothing on earth so wretched as tlie genius
 
 OTHMAR. 361 
 
 which is born to speak, yet fettered by circumstance, stands 
 dumb.' 
 
 She heard, but she remained unmoved. She was but a 
 child, and she had a great hopeless passion shut in her heart, 
 and the vileness of the world had touched her like the saliva of 
 an unclean beast, and what could the fame which such a woild 
 could give seem ever worth to her? All the youth and the 
 warmth, and the awaking senses and the wasted tenderness in 
 her all yearned for gentler, simpler, tenderer things, than the 
 glittering corselet of fame and the noisy applause of a crowd. 
 Rosselin was so used to being all alone himself so many a year, 
 that he could not measure the loneliness of a girl who has no 
 mother to weep with her, no sister to laugh with her, no lover 
 to kiss the dewy roses of her lips. He forgot that when he 
 spoke to her of fame and of art, all her young life called out in 
 her, ' Ah — where is love % ' 
 
 He stayed until late in the evening, bringing to bear on her 
 all the arguments and all the persuasions of which his fertile 
 memory and eloquent tongue could arm him ; but he failed to 
 pierce the secret of the change in her, and he abandoned in 
 despair the effort to form her steps to Amyot. He left her in 
 anger and in reproach in the soft vajaours of a sweet night of 
 early spring, fragrant with the scent of opening fruit blossoms 
 and of violets growing under the low dark clouds of rain. He 
 was alarmed, afraid, and full of impotent anger and of unsatis- 
 fied wonder. 
 
 ' Who has been v/itli her ? What has she heard 1 ' he asked 
 himself in vain, as he walked through the cold shadowy sweet- 
 scented fields. His own heart was heavy with anxiety and dis- 
 appointment. She was the last ambition of his life. For her 
 his own youth, his own genius had seemed to live afresh, and 
 ally themselves with the awaking forces of a coming time. 
 
 What some men feel in their children's promise he felt in 
 hers. 
 
 He recognised in her the existence of great gifts, of uncom- 
 mon powers, which would move the minds and the hearts of 
 nations. That such things should be wrecked because the mere 
 common useless sorrow of a human 1o-.-<g held her soul captive 
 and made her mouth dumb, seemed to the great artist the 
 the cruellest irony of fate, the crowning anomaly of all gods' 
 grim jests. 
 
 Was Love ever, he thought bitterly, any better thing than 
 the satire of success, the curse of genius, the ruin of imagina- 
 tion and of art ?
 
 362 OTHMAR. 
 
 CHAPTER L. 
 
 Damari.s remained unmoved by the departure of her old friend 
 —almost unconscious of it. His words had drifted by her ear, 
 bringing little meaning, and no conviction. He spoke as an 
 artist, as a man, as experience and the world suggested to him ; 
 but his arguments could avail nothing against the instincts of 
 her own heart and the horror which the charges and the offer 
 of Blanche de Laon had left upon the ignorance and innocence 
 of her mind. What would have been as nothing to one who 
 had dwelt in the world, to which evil is familiar and disgrace 
 immaterial if of profit, was of an overwhelming disgust and 
 terror to a child whose brain was nurtured on the high un- 
 worldly chivalries of the great poets, and who had dwelt in a 
 solitude of imaginative meditation amongst the solitudes of 
 nature, amongst the simple and noble lessons of ' the world as 
 it is God's.' 
 
 She passed the whole day in a kind of trance. She ate 
 nothing ; she drank water thirstily. She scarcely replied to the 
 questions of the woman of the house. The night went by, 
 bringing her no sleep, no dreams ; she was in that kind of agony 
 which nothing except youth, in all its exaggeration, its magnifi- 
 cent follies, and its pathetic ignorance, can suffer. At daybreak 
 she went out with her companions, the dogs, and roamed half 
 unconsciously and c^uite aimlessly over the pastures which in the 
 days of Port Royal had been trodden by so many restless feet, 
 along the margin of the little stream which had heard the sigh 
 of so many a world-wearied heart. 
 
 The morning was clear and cold and very still. Far away 
 where Paris lay there was a dusky, heavy cloud. By noon her 
 mind was made up. 
 
 A great and heroic impulse came upon her, born out of the 
 innocence of her soul and the infinitude of her gratitude. 
 
 With its instinct of self-negation and noble efforts moving 
 impetuously in her as the warm sap moves in the young vines, 
 she t(jok no time to rellect, sought no word of counsel. She 
 covered herself in her great red-lined cloak, and took lier well- 
 known way once mere across the pastures, bidding the woman of 
 the house keep the dogs within. 
 
 The movement of walking, the coolness of the wind, the 
 scent of air full of all the promise of the spring, renewed the 
 health and youth in her, gave her courage and exaltation and 
 force. Her dual nature, with its homely rustic strength and its 
 patrician pride, its peasant's stubbornness and its poet's illu- 
 Bions, moved her by dual motives, dual instincts, on the path
 
 OTHMAR. 363 
 
 she took. To do something for him, however slight, to try and 
 move for him that only soul which had the power to please his 
 own, to prove that she was not vile or mean or basely comiting 
 on personal gains or ^^ersonal glories — this seemed the only thing 
 that life had left her to do. 
 
 All her innocent ambitions were dead ; the career of which 
 she had dreamed with delight now seemed to her only loath- 
 some. 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 imagina- 
 tive 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 
 l^ower. 
 
 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 sus- 
 picion lie on her, she felt that she would seek death as Yseulte 
 de Valogno 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 E-acine dreamed ; 
 and witli the rapid resolute movements of a mind strung up to 
 some great action and committed to some course accej^ted 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 
 tliat 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 dai'k, 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 cnme 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 sim and the dev,^ ; and all the exigencies
 
 364 OTHMAR. 
 
 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 Plulippe 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 liim, ' Is this house 
 hers \ ' and how he had answered, ' Surely, my dear, what is 
 mine is hers,' and of how tlien she had longed to rise and go out, 
 homeless and friendless as she was, and die in tlie streets rather 
 than staj' 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 slie would be 
 nothing in his life. She had been sheltered there for a few 
 Aveeks 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 op- 
 pressed 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 emptmess of heart, and vain desires, whicli 
 haunted him, master of so much though he was, filled her with 
 an agony of longing to be able to give him that siniple herb of 
 sweet content which will so rarely blossom in the gardens of the 
 great, in tlie orchid houses of tlie rich man. 
 
 She stood in the sunliglit which slione and glittered on the 
 gilded gates, a dark and lonely figure so motionless and still 
 that the concierge spoke to lier roughly, bidding her not stand 
 so near. At that moment through the gateways there came the 
 Russian equipage of tlie mistress of the house ; the three black 
 horses were rearing and jilunging, 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 i^urposc which liad driven lier tliithcr, and not 
 wholly conscious of what she did, Damaris stretched her hands
 
 OTHMAR. 365 
 
 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 supislicant 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. 
 
 ' ^Vhen 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 1 ' 
 
 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 Amyot : 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 homelcssness 
 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 
 wliicli 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 dis- 
 grace in those cold eyes. She remembei-ed 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 
 Avhen it stood ajar ; she turned away into the quietude of this 
 little side stxeet, 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
 
 366 OTHMAR. 
 
 of Amyot ; the peacocks swept v.-ith 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 tex'race, 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, 
 almost 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 suflering 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 unseltish to sublimity, all these had made her 
 nerves strung to high tension, her mind little capable of separ- 
 ating 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 Berarde.' 
 
 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 fr(^m Chevrcuse, the girl avIio was here last 
 summer,' said one idle lounger to another, then they laughed 
 a little together in Ioav tones ; and she heard one say, ' It isia 
 pity Othuiar is still at Ferrii ivs I ' 
 
 Then ojie of tlieia indolently .showed her a staircase
 
 OTHMAR. 367 
 
 'Go up there,' he said to her. ' My lady's apartments are 
 to the right. You will tind 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 gi'een 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 Berarde.' 
 
 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 
 Avith 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. 
 AVhite lilac and white jessamine tilled large silver bowls of 
 Indian artificers' work. The portrait of her children in the 
 rose gardens of Amyot, 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 dedi- 
 cated 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'Uzes' ; 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 dress- 
 ings and undressings, all these amusements which so seldom 
 were amusements — tant dc jruh i)our si pea de rhose! 
 
 In ten years' — twelve years'— time she would bring out her
 
 368 OTHMAR. 
 
 daughter and maxTy 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 fetes for Easter at 
 Amyot ; royal guests were bidden to them ; he would of neces- 
 sity 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 dis- 
 simulation, to eSace the traces of feud, to bring in its train 
 those obligations of surface-courtesies and outward amities 
 which restrain all violent expression of emotion 1 
 
 One of her women with hesitation approached her, and with 
 apology ventured to say that some one was waiting who en- 
 treated to see her ; a young girl, Damaris Berarde. Was sho 
 to be permitted to come in ? or should she be dismissed ? 
 
 ' Dainaris Berarde ! ' she repeated with amazement. 
 
 The women were astonished to see that this plebeian name, 
 imknown 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 ex- 
 treme 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 Avas to give tlie instant refusal for which 
 her women looked ; but her next was to wait, to hesitate : per- 
 haps to consent ; the strangeness of such a visit outweighed with 
 her its insolence and intrusion. She dislilvcd all things Avhich 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 tliis creature whom 
 she despised, was stronger with her than her haughty amaze at 
 such a request, ■whilst the morbid love of analysis and of pene- 
 trating to the depths of all cmotitms, and of playing on them, 
 wliicli is common to the century, and in her reached its extreme 
 indulgence and development, impelled her to allow the entrance
 
 OTHMAR. 369 
 
 of Damaris into her presence, that she might see the issue of a 
 situation of which the jieculiarity 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 lirst imi^Lilse was to have her thrust out shamefully by 
 her household, the next was that intellectual inquisitiveness 
 which was the strongest characteristic of her mind. Desjjised, 
 contemned, abhorred as this girl was by her, she yet felt a 
 strange desire to see .and to examine what she believed jjossessed 
 the power foreign, 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 M'ere her own. But the disgust, 
 the oflence, 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 inferioi'.-;, 
 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, 
 tiie 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 Be'rarde,' 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
 
 370 OTILUAR. 
 
 received slic would ho welcomed, that iDCcause those doors liad 
 unclosed to admit her, that behind them slie might hoj^e to find 
 a friend. 
 
 This silence, this coldness, this unspoken but all-eloquent 
 disdain made her feel herself the intruder and alien wliich she 
 was, there in the house of Othmar, in the presence of liis 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 Nadege, with her 
 cruellest intonation. ' Those of Count Othmar are on the other 
 side of the house.' 
 
 The intensity of emotion which possessed Damaris, the in- 
 tensity of resolve which was in her, the high-strung and over- 
 wrought 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 lier great rival I'epulsed her. She crossed 
 the room, and caught the shining satin folds of the gown in her 
 hands and hung on them. 
 
 ' Let me speak to you once, only this once,' she cried. ' I 
 only came to Paris for that ' 
 
 ' What can you seek from me 1 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. 
 
 ' 1 came to Pai-is 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 lier 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 
 miimcnt the strangeness of the supplication outweighed her 
 pitiless scorn of the suppliant. 
 
 Her dignity would never have alhnved 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
 
 OTHMAR. 371 
 
 hci" 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 livhig creature. 
 
 'I will hear you,' she said, and drew her skirts from the 
 touch of Damaris, and seated herseK 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, passion- 
 ately 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 to- 
 gether in earnestness as she spoke at length to this woman who 
 had been the terror of her dreams so long. 
 
 'I do not know Avhat 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 woi'ked 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. 
 
 Nadege 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. 
 
 B B 2
 
 372 OTHMAR. 
 
 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 ' 
 
 Nadfege 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 tlie 
 Champs Elysees, 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 cliamber ? Why did she not send 
 for her husband and confi'ont 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 ofi'ended 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, mean- 
 while 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 wliich bitterly offended and mortally 
 alienated her, was a contradiction which was utterly bej^ond her 
 comprehension. That the Avife 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 liave 
 understood ; but this complex mind, which could play with its 
 o\\Ti 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 Avhat 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. 
 1 am nothing to him. He loves you '
 
 OTHMAR- 2>1 
 
 3/0 
 
 * 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 heai'er. To be assured of her husband's love by 
 the subject of her husband's illicit anaours ! Even the ironical 
 patience and the ccmtemptuous tolerance of her habitual temper 
 could not remain in silence under such an outrage to her posi- 
 tion 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 in- 
 tense rage, only controlled by pride still greatee than itself. 
 ' How dare you come where I and my children dwelj ? 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 1 do not you know that he himself is sick of heart 
 because you care so little? You will not believe. Oh, God, 
 what shall I say to you I 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 T said to myself that perhaps you did not know 
 this, that perhaps you would care if you did know, that perhaps 
 you would put soHie warmth in his heart, give him some kinder 
 Avords. I say it ill, but this is what 1 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 sen- 
 sualist 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 wasloathsomg
 
 374 OTHMAR. 
 
 to her ; but it was a truth, and she confessed it as such to her 
 omi mind. Yet, even %\-hilst 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 o^-n 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 re- 
 mained 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, Beheve 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 Avhere 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 
 grealr lady, and the world is with you, and you have many 
 lovers and courtiers, they say, but what Avill it profit you, all of 
 it, if one day he looks at you and you know that he thinks of 
 you no more because j^ou, yourself, have killed his soul in him ? ' 
 '1 am flattered that Count Othmar has made me the subject 
 of his discourse with you ! ' 
 
 Damaris perceived the fault she had committed, the oflence 
 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 liim seldom ; very seldom ; 
 only once this year ; but that once he did speak of you, and I 
 knew that all liis 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 can-ied a sense of their 
 sincerity to the sceptical ear of their auditor. Almost for the 
 moment she believed tliat they were truth. A sense of com- 
 jiassion touclicd her.
 
 OTHMAR. 375 
 
 This girl, so young, so ignorant, so hopelessly devoted to a 
 man who could be nothing to her, seemed to her childish, melo- 
 dramatic, plebeian, absurd ; and j-et had a certain nobilitj' and 
 force, and pathos, and mystery in her which stirred to pity this 
 heart which had never known pity. She had been only a 
 l)easant, 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 frailtie;^ 
 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 con- 
 tempt. 
 
 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 rCAc of disinterested innocence with any 
 chance of duping me. AVhy 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 Avonder. 
 
 '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 in- 
 dignant face, her truthful voice, all bore their witness to her 
 innocence and ignorance, all told even the prejudice and arro- 
 gance of her judge, that whatever the facts might be she her.-elf 
 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 Avas a peasant, if she were the dupe 
 of her lover, was hers the fault ? But that jealous scorn Avliich 
 has no pity and no justice in it, swept over her soul afresh, and 
 extinguished in her all the finer charities and nobler compre- 
 hension of her mind. 
 
 'It is useless to tell me this,' she said Avith cold coni-empt. 
 * Whether you knoAV it or not, your grandfather left you
 
 Z7(> OTHMAR. 
 
 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 jDurpose 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 in- 
 credulous 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 wlien 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 melo- 
 drama, an invention, yet there were certain tones, certain 
 words in it wliich haunted her with a persistent sense of tlieir 
 trutli. 
 
 These had not been common entreaties, common reproaches, 
 Avhicli Damaris had addressed to her ; there had been an im- 
 personal generosity, a noble simplicity, in them whicli lifted 
 them out of the charge of sensational and dramatic affectation. 
 There was an enigma in them which she could not solve. Tliey 
 were unselfish and founded on accurate knowledge ; they were 
 out of keeping in the mouth of a j>aid companion of a man's 
 passing amourettes. It seemed wholly impossible to her that 
 tliey could have been spoken trutlifully, 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 sui)pUcations to her to make the 
 life which was spent beside hers happier — ' happier ! ' — that one 
 simple word wliich was so ill-fitted to the complex feelings, the 
 capi-icious demands, and the liyi^ercritical exigencies of such 
 characters as tlieirs. 
 
 She had no doubt that lier 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 unassail- 
 able height and dignity and rank she had stooped to strike a
 
 OTHMAR. 2>77 
 
 creature not only unworthy of her Avrath, 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 tliis 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 con- 
 tent 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. 
 
 When her women came she began her toilette for the dinner 
 at the Duchesse d'Uzes'. It was long, and nothing contented her. 
 
 From that dinner she went to various other hovs?s ; she 
 returned to her own house late ; she heard that Othmar had 
 come back from Ferrieres and gone to his own apartments. The 
 following day they would be obliged to go to Amyot. The great 
 liarty there could by no possibility be postponed ; royal people 
 were bidden to it. If such a gathering were broken up at the 
 last moment, for any less cause than death or illness, the whole 
 world would know that there was subject for separation and 
 dissension between her husband and herself. She would have 
 given ten years of her life to prevent the world ever knowing 
 that. 
 
 For the first time in her life, as her woman unrobed her and 
 took off her jewels, she was conscious that she had been unwise 
 in the management of fate. She had been desii'ous that the 
 world should see that her influence could even withstand and 
 outlast all those adversaries of time and custom and disillusion 
 which saw stealthily at the roots of every human happiness and 
 sympathy ; yet she had been so careless and so indilierent, that 
 she had allowed the very changes which she wished the world 
 never to see, to creep in upon her unawares. 
 
 It had never occurred to her that she had been as inconsistent 
 as one who wishing to preserve untouched a fragile vase of 
 crystal, should set it and leave it in a crowded street for anyone 
 to use or break who chose. She had not cared to keep her 
 crystal vase herself, and yet she was enraged that it was 
 broken. 
 
 CHAPTER LIT. 
 
 Damap.is went out blindly, down the staircase and across the 
 vestibule and halls into the open air. 
 
 She had no knowledge of what she did ; the serving-men 
 looked at her and then at each other, and laughed, and Avhispered
 
 378 OTHMAR. 
 
 some coarse things, but no one attempted to arrest her steps ; 
 on the contrary, they put her right when she mistook her way 
 in the corridor, and ahnost shoved her into the street, where the 
 light of day was fading. 
 
 She was strongly made in body and in mind, and in all the 
 tumult of her thoughts, the sickness of her shame, she did not 
 grow faint, or forget her road, or fall upon the stones, over which 
 her feet were dragged so wearily. 
 
 She found the streets which led to the station of the West, 
 and sat down in the waiting-chamber, and heard the roar of 
 Paris go on round her like the roaring of wild boasts calling for 
 food : that those beasts had not devoured her was due to him ; 
 she did not reproach him or forget her debt to him, only she 
 wished that he had let her die that night upon the bridge. 
 
 The doors flew open, the bells rang, the crowds hastened ; 
 without any conscious action on her part she was pushed with 
 the others to the wicket, paid the coins they asked her for, and 
 found her way to a seat in the crowded waggons. 
 
 The train moved. Soon the cold country air of evening 
 blowing through an open window revived her, and brought her 
 a clearer sense of where she was, of what had happened. She 
 saw always that cold, still, regal figure looking doM n on her witli 
 such ineffable disdain ; she heard always that chill, languid, 
 contemptuous voice, sweet as music, cruel as the knife which 
 severs the cord of life. 
 
 ' She does not believe,' she muttered again and again. ' She 
 will never believe.' 
 
 Those who were in the carriage with her heard the broken 
 stupid words said over and over again, while her great eyes 
 looked out, wide opened and startled, into the shadows of the 
 descending night. 
 
 One or two of them spoke roughly to her, being afraid of 
 her ; then she was silent, vaguely understanding that they 
 thought her strange and odd. 
 
 Slie leaned in a corner and shrank from their comments and 
 their gaze. 
 
 It was now quite dark ; the flickering lamplight seemed to 
 wane and oscillate before her eyes ; she had not touched food or 
 water for many hours ; her throat was dry, her hands were hot, 
 lier head felt light ; she had done all she could and had failed. 
 The only thing she had gained was a knowledge which seemed 
 to eat her very soul away with its shame and misery. 
 
 She Avas so young that she did not know that if she liad 
 patience to live through tliis agony it would cease in time, and 
 grow less terrible to her witli every year which should pass over 
 ]ier liead. She did not know the solace that comes with the 
 mere passage of the seasons ; to her the shame, the torture she 
 endured were eternal.
 
 OTHMAR. 379 
 
 She had taken his money innocently, ignorantly indeed, 
 honestly believing it to be her own ; but she understood now 
 why to his wife she seemed only a wretched paid creature of 
 hazard ; she understood now why the Princess de Laon had 
 spoken to her as to one of whose avarice and whose vileness 
 there was no doubt. 
 
 To the haughty, frank innocent soul of the child it was such 
 unspeakable degradation that it seemed to stop the very pulses 
 of life in her. 
 
 She could have torn the clothes off her body because they 
 had been bought with this money she had ignorantly accepted 
 as her own. 
 
 Not for one moment did she do him the wrong that his wife 
 had done him ; she never doubted his motives, or thought that 
 any intention save that of the kindest and most chivalrous 
 compassion had been at the root of his generosity to her. Her 
 mind was too intrinsically noble, her instincts were too pure 
 and untainted by suspifton, for any baser supposition to attach 
 itself to him in her thoughts, even in the moment of her greatest 
 suffering. 
 
 Only she wished — ah, God ! how she wished — that he had 
 left her to die on the bridge in that summer night. 
 
 Intense pride had always been existent beneath her ardent 
 and careless temperament ; the stubborn self-will of the peasant 
 united to the finer, more impersonal, pride derived from a great 
 race. She had been always taught to suffice for herself, to repel 
 assistance as indignity, to hold herself the equal of all living 
 creatures; and now what was she? — only what Jean Berarde, 
 had he been living, would have driven out of his presence as a 
 beggar, only what all the labourers in the fields of the vale of 
 Chevi'euse would have the right to hoot after as she passed 
 them. Her imagination distorted and her sensitiveness exagge- 
 rated all the debt she owed to Othmar ; to herself she seemed 
 nothing better than any one of those wretched paupers who 
 stretched their hands out to him as he passed. The shame of 
 it made all the devotion she bore to him seem a hoiror, a 
 disgrace, a thing cankered and corruj^t, which he must despise 
 utterly if he knew aught of it. And what should he know? 
 What should he care '\ What could she be in his sight except a 
 friendless, lonely thing, whom he had saved from want, as he 
 might save any ragged, homeless, child who asked for a sou 
 from him in the streets. 
 
 She loved him with the passion of Juliet, of Francesca, of 
 Mignon, and she found herself so disgraced in her own sight 
 that nothing she could ever do, it seemed to her, would make 
 any utterance from her, even of gratitude, worth the breath 
 spent in speaking it. To him and to his wife she would be for
 
 38o OTHMAR. 
 
 ever, all their lives long, only a jjoasant who had not had 
 strength or courage to earn her own daily bread. 
 
 The cold scorn which had gazed at her from the eyes of his 
 wife seemed to pierce through and through the very core and 
 centre of her life. She had dreamed of being great in this 
 woman's sight, of compelling her admiration, her applause, even 
 her envy ! — and all the while she had been nothing more than 
 any dog which lived on the food thrown from their table. 
 
 The train went on through the descending darkness of the 
 night, and the scent of the wind blowing over grass-lands and 
 \\ heat-fields came to her in her trance, and filled her with a 
 strange dumb longing to be put away for ever in silence under 
 the cool and kindly earth, the budding leaves, the sj^routing 
 corn. The aged hate the thought of death, and fear and shun 
 it ; but for the young it has no terrors, and in their pain it 
 always beckons, with a smile, to them to rest in the arms of the 
 great Madre Natura. Death seemed to her the only stream 
 which could wash her soul white again from the indignity it 
 had, all unconsciously, accepted. A passion which was hopeless 
 and cruel, and ashamed of its own force, burned up her young 
 heart like fire. Dead, only, it seemed to him that she might 
 keep some place in his compassion and his remembrance without 
 indignity. 
 
 iShe descended at the familiar road-side of Trappes, and 
 passed through the wicket, and took her way through the 
 country paths she knew so well. It was not yet a year since 
 they had first brought her there, and she had laughed with joy 
 to see the country sights and hear the country sounds once 
 more. Now they only hurt her with ar« intolei'able pain. 
 
 The night was dark, and a fine s'iglit rain was falling, but 
 she was not conscious of it. She found her way by instinct, as 
 a blind dog finds his ; it was long, and went over fields and 
 ]iastures, but she kept straight on unerringly, going home, why 
 .slie knew not, for she felt that she would never dwell there 
 another day : now that she knew. 
 
 Kow that she knew, she could not have touched a coin of 
 that silver and gold which lay in her drawer in her room at Los 
 Ilameaux ; she would not have eaten a crust of the bread which 
 liad been purchased with it. She had no idea what she Avould 
 do ; she was alone once more, as utterly alone as she had been 
 when her solitary boat had been launched on the world of 
 waters, to reach a haven or to founder as it might. Her only 
 instinct was to go anywhere on the earth, or under the earth, 
 where the eyes of Othmar's wife could never find her in their 
 merciless scorn. 
 
 Everything had gone from her, all her dreams of a future, 
 all her love for art and for the poets, all her bright and buoyant 
 courage, all lier innocent and idealised ambitions : they wero
 
 OTHMAR. 381 
 
 all gone for evermore ; she was alone without that companion- 
 sliij) of a fearless hope which had sustained her strength upon 
 tlie lonely seas, and in the hell of Paris. She had no hope now 
 of any kind ; and youth can no more live without it, than 
 flowers can live without the air of heaven. She was weakened 
 from fasting, and her brain was giddy ; as she walked on over 
 the rough ground through the chill rain, she thought she 
 was on the island ; she thought her grandfather was calling 
 to her not to loiter, she thought dead Catherine was stretching 
 out her arms to her, and crying, ' Hasten ! hasten ! ' She 
 smelt the odour of the orange flowers, she heard the sound 
 of the sea washing up amongst the pebbles and the sand — ' if I 
 could only die there, if I could only die there,' she thought dully, 
 as she stumbled through the wet grass and the fields of colza. 
 
 Death would be so easy and so sweet, amongst the blue bright 
 rolling water, in the scented southerly air, under the broad 
 white moon of her own skies. 
 
 She came with a shock to a knowledge that she was entering 
 the village of Les Hameaux as a peasant driving furiously 
 shrieked to her to move out of his road, and in the cabins around 
 the lights tAvinkled as the people of the house sat at their suppers 
 of soup and bread. Burning tears rushed to her eyes and fell 
 down her cheeks. She knew that she would never see the 
 shores of Bonaventure again in life. 
 
 She went through the village with weary steps, she was very 
 tired, her wet clothes clung to her, her face was white and 
 drawn, her hands and her throat were hot. Some people lean- 
 ing against the doorposts of their houses looked at her, and 
 wondered to see her out so late, so wet, so jaded, and all alone. 
 She went through the hamlet without pausing and without 
 hearing any of the words called out to her. 
 
 Outside the village and on the road to the farm of the Croix 
 Blanche, there stood a lonely cottage, half hidden in elder trees 
 and built two centuries before with the stones and rubble of the 
 ruins of Port Royal. A woman whom she knew dwelt there 
 with four young children : a widow, very poor, making what 
 living she could from poultry and from fruit ; a laborious, 
 patient, honest, and good soul, always at work in all weathers, 
 and happy because the four fair-haired laughing children 
 tumbled after her in the grass or in the dust. 
 
 As she passed down the road in the grey film of rain, this 
 woman ran out of the house to her, weeping piteously, and 
 catching at her clothes to make her stop. 
 
 ' My Pierrot is dying ! ' she cried to her. ' He has the ball 
 in his throat — he Avill be dead by dawn — for the love of God 
 send some one to me. I am all alone.' 
 
 Damaris pausing, looked at her stupidly. Indistinctly 
 roused from her own stupor, she Avas unconscious for the
 
 3S2 OTHMAR. 
 
 moment whore she was oi' who spoke to her. The hght througli 
 the open doomvay streamed out into the road ; she saw the wild 
 eyes, the tearful cheeks, the dishevelled hair of the wretched 
 mother ; she understood by instinct what w-oe had come upon 
 the house. Pierrot was the youngest and the prettiest of the 
 four little children who lived huddled together, and happy under 
 these elder trees like small unfledged birds in a nest. 
 
 ' Do not come in, do not come near him,' cried the woman, 
 * oh, my dear, it would be death ; but send some one who is 
 old and will not mind; the old never take this sickness — and 
 I have been all alone till I am mad. My pretty baby — the 
 prettiest, the youngest ! ' 
 
 Damaris looked at her with dull, blind eyes. A strange 
 sense of fatality came on her ; here was death — not death in the 
 clear blue water which would never more smite her limbs with 
 its joyous blows, and rock her in the cradle of its waves ; but 
 death which would end all things, which would put her away to 
 rest under the green earth, which would purify her from greed 
 and from baseness in his sight. She turned and entered through 
 the doorway of the house. 
 
 ' I am not afraid,' she said to the woman. ' I will stay with 
 Pierrot.' 
 
 The woman strove to draw her bask, but she would not be 
 dissuaded from her choice. 
 
 'If God will it, I shall die,' she thought ; ' and if I die, then 
 perhaps she will believe, and he remember me.' 
 
 CHAPTER LIII. 
 
 The great Easter fetes at Amyot w^ere successful with all that 
 brilliancy of decoration and novelty of wit for which their 
 mistress was famous to all Europe. The weather was mild, tlie 
 guests were harmonious, the princes and their consorts were 
 well anmsed ; nothing moi'e agreeable or more original had 
 been known in the entertainments of the time ; and the choicest 
 and rarest forms of art Avere brought there to lend the dignity 
 of scholarship to the graces and frivolities of pleasure. 
 
 No one noticed that the host and hostess of Amyot never 
 once spoke a word to each other throughout this week of cere- 
 mony and festivity, except such phrases as their reception of 
 and courtesy to others ci'mpelled them to exchange. No one 
 observed or suspected the bitter estrangement between them, 
 so well did each play their parts in this pageantry and comedy 
 of society. No one except Blanche de Laon, who thought with 
 contentment : ' qa marchc ! ' 
 
 Othmar had not so^n his wife for one moment alone sine©
 
 OTHMAR. 3S3 
 
 the day wlieu ho had left her -with the bitterness of her hi- 
 credulity and lier insult like ashes in his soul. 
 
 Tlie world with its demands, its subjugations, and its per- 
 petual audience, was always there. 
 
 Que de fois fermente ct gronde, 
 
 Sous un air de froid Donehaloir, 
 
 Un soixriant doscspoir 
 Soiij la mascarade du moiide ! 
 
 He knew not whether he most loathed, or was most grateful 
 to, this constant crowd and pressure of society which spared 
 him thought, postponed decision, gave him no leisure to look 
 into his own soul, and sent him to his joyless couch more tired 
 out with the fatigue of so-called pleasure than the labourer in 
 the vineyards or the forests by his day of toil. 
 
 The six days passed without any cloud upon their splendour 
 or their gaiety, so far as the three hundred guests gathered 
 there could see, or even dreamed. The sunshine of the early 
 spring was poured on the glittering roofs, the stately terraces, 
 the towers and fanes, the gardens and the waters, of this 
 gracious place where the old French life of other days seemed 
 to revive with all its wit, its elegance, and its good manners, 
 as they had been before the shadow of the guillotine fell over a 
 darkened land. With the eighth day the royal guests and most 
 of the others took their leave. Some score of friends more 
 intimate alone remained there. 
 
 A certain dread came upon him of the first hour on which 
 he should find liimself alone before his wife. He felt that it 
 was the supreme crisis of his life with her; the frail cup of 
 existence in which their happiness, such as it was, was placed, 
 was set in the furnace of doubt to be graven and proved, or to 
 be wrecked and burst into a thousand pieces. 
 
 ' If only she Avould say to me that she believed me,' he 
 thought, ' I would, I think, forgive the rest.' 
 
 But this she never said. 
 
 Man-like, the very indignity he had suffered, the very sense 
 he had of her cruelty, her insolence, her injustice, seemed only 
 to re-awaken in him tliat passion for her which had so deeply 
 coloured and absorbed his nature. The very knowledge that 
 legally and in name he v>ras her master, her possessor, whilst in 
 fact he could not touch a hair of her head or move a chord of 
 her heart, sufficed to re-arouse in him all those desires which 
 die of facility and familiarity, and accjuire the strength of giants 
 on denial. 
 
 He had almost forgotten Damaris. The gentle and com- 
 passionate tenderness he felt for her could have no place beside 
 the bitter-sweet passion which filled his memory and his soul 
 for his wife. 
 
 In these days, when he was constantly in her presence, con-
 
 384 OTHMAR. 
 
 stantly within the sound of her voice, and compelled by tha 
 conventionalities of society to address conventional phrases to 
 her, whilst yet severed by the world from her as much as if a 
 river of fire were between them, something of that delirious 
 love which he had felt for her in the lifetime of ISTapraxine re- 
 turned to him, iniited to a passion of regret and a poignancy of 
 wrath which was almost hatred. He was lier husband- -her 
 lord by all the fictions of men's laws — and he would not be per- 
 mitted to touch one of the pearls about her throat or obtain five 
 minutes' audience of her ! She was tlie mother of his children, 
 and yet she was as far aloof from him as though she were some 
 Phidian statue with jewelled eyes and breasts of ivory ! 
 
 Whilst he went amongst his guests outAvardly calm and 
 coldly courteous, fulfilling all the duties of a host, his heart 
 was in a tumult of indignation and despair. The failure of his 
 whole life was before hhn. Without her the whole of the 
 world was valueless to him. 
 
 Yet of one thing he was resolved. lie would not live under 
 tlie same roof with a woman who believed him guilty of a lie to 
 her, wlio insulted him as he would not have insulted the com- 
 monest of his servants. He would sever his existence from 
 hers, let it cost him what it would. The cost would be great : 
 to bring the world as a witness of their disunion ; to admit to 
 society that his marriage had been a failure, like so many 
 others ; to let his children, as they grew older, know that their 
 parents were strangers and enemies : all this would be more 
 bitter than death itself to him. All the reserve and the delicacy 
 of his temper made the idea of the world's comments on his 
 quarrel with his wife intoleral)lc to him, and the rupture of his 
 ties to her unendurably painful in its inevitable publicity. He 
 was lover enough still to shrink from the thought of any future 
 in which he would cease to hear her voice, to see her face. 
 True, of late their union had been but nominal. She had passed 
 her life in separate interests and separate pleasures. Slie liad 
 allowed him to sec no more of her than her merest acquaintances 
 saw, and to meet her only in the crowds of that great world 
 which separates what it unites. Yet absolute severance from her 
 — such severance as would be inevitable if once their existences 
 were led apart — was a thing without hope, would make him 
 more powerless to touch her hand, to approach her presence, 
 than any stranger who had access to her house. Once separated, 
 her pride and his would keep them asunder till the grave. Ho 
 knew that, and all tlie remembered passion which had been at 
 ■jnce the strongest and the weakest thing in him shrank from 
 the vision of his lonelj' future. 
 
 Yet all the manhood in him told him that to continue to live 
 under the same roof Avith a woman wliose every word was insult 
 to him, Avoukl degrade him utterly and for ever in his eyes and
 
 OTHMAR. 385 
 
 in her own. And he had loved her too passionately for it to be 
 possible for him to continue to dwell in that j^assive enmity, 
 that alienation covered with ostensible cordiality and external 
 courtesy, with which so many men and women deceive society 
 to the end of their lives, and sustain a hollow tx-uce, of which 
 the hatefulness and the untruth are only visible to themselves 
 and to their children. Such insincerity, such hypocrisy, as this, 
 were to him altogether impossible. Sooner than lead such a life, 
 he felt that he would end his days with liis own hand, and leave 
 mankind to blame him as they would : they would not blame her. 
 
 On her part, unknown to him, she watched him with a new 
 interest, bitter, painful, and more absorbing than any which 
 had ever had power upon her ; a feeling of disdain, of scorn, of 
 impatience, of regi'et, of forgiveness, of tenderness, all inextric- 
 ably mingled in an emotion stronger than any she had known. 
 When she thought of him as in any way with however much 
 indifference as the lover of Damai'is, she was conscious of an 
 intense disgust, of a wondering scorn, which were not wise or 
 cold, or temperate with the judicial severity of her usual judg- 
 ments, but were merely and strongly hviman, and born of 
 human emotions. They humiliated her with the consciousness 
 of their own humanity, and the uncontrollable bitterness of the 
 sentiments which they aroused in her. Jealousy it could have 
 scarce been called. For jealousy implies a recognition of 
 equality, a fear of usurj^ation, and these to her haughty soul 
 were impossible in face of a peasant girl, a declassee, a warf and 
 stray, with no place in the world save such as Othmar might 
 choose to give her. Jealousy in tliis sense, jealousy intellectual 
 and moral it was not ; but jealousy physical it was. She thought 
 and hated to think of the personal beauty of Damaris ; she thought 
 and hated to think of all those summer hours in her own house 
 in which that beauty had been helpless and dependent before 
 him. Like all women who know much of the natures of men, 
 she knew that the senses were often beyond control, when the 
 heart in no way went with them. She had always thought that 
 it would never matter to her whither such undisciplined vagaries 
 might lead him. She had always felt with the disdain of a 
 nature over wliich physical desires have little power, that 
 wherever his caprice took him there he might go for aught 
 that she would say to restrain him. 
 
 She was startled to find that it did pain her, that it did revolt 
 her, to believe that this disloyalty had been done her, that this 
 child had had from liim even the slightest, most soulless kind of 
 love. 
 
 Her world had never seen her more full of wit, and grace, and 
 brilliancy, than in those days when in her inmost soul she 
 suffered more mental pain and doubt than she had ever known. 
 Life had become touched with humiliation, indignation, emotion 
 
 G o
 
 386 OTHMAR. 
 
 of a complex kind, contemptuous anger, and a vague remorse ; 
 but it liad thereby become to her once more a thing of interest 
 and of vitality, her languor had been startled, Tier self-love 
 shocked, her whole nature stirred. She gave no sign of it that 
 any one, either foe or friend, could read, but she was conscious 
 that these emotions which she had ridiculed in others could 
 become the dominant forces and tyrannical preoccupation even 
 of her own thoughts and life. 
 
 A sensation of failure, of loss, of humiliation, was always 
 with her ; not so much for this fact of what she believed to be 
 his infidelity, as for her own consciousness that she herself had 
 been untrue to all the theories and philosophies of her existence, 
 that she had failed to guide their lives into that calm haven of 
 friendsliip and mutual comprehension which had always seemed 
 to her the only possibly decent grave for a dead passion ; and 
 had failed also in this crisis of their fates to preserve that 
 wisdom, patience, and composure, which can alone lend dignity 
 to the woman who sees her power passed away. 
 
 All her life long she had woven the most ingenious and 
 elaborate theories as to the failure of men and women to secure 
 fidelity and peace ; she had reasoned with perfect philosophy on 
 the causes of that failure, and turned to ridicule that childish 
 passion and that fretful inaptitude with which the great majority 
 meet those inevitable changes of the affections and the character 
 which time brings to all. But now, she herself, having been 
 met with such changes, had don no better, and been no wiser 
 than they all. She had suffered like them, she had made 
 reproaches like them, she had allowed indignation and offence to 
 hasten her into anger which could only gratify her enemies 
 and all the gaping world. 
 
 ' Any fool could have done what I have done ! ' she thought, 
 with bitter impatience against 1 erself : any fool could have 
 reproached him, and denounced him, and placed him in such a 
 position that out of sheer manliness he had no choice left but to 
 reiterate the untruth once told, and go on in the path once taken. 
 
 Yet she knew that were it to be done again, again she would 
 do the same. When she thought of him as the lover of this 
 child, she was only conscious of the mere foolish, irrational, 
 perso:.al, bitterness of emotion whicli any other feebler woman 
 would have felt. 
 
 Had she not said under the oaktrees yonder in her Court of 
 Love, that inconstancy, being only involuntary, should be 
 blamed by none : had she not again and again said and thought 
 that what a woman or a lover cannot keep, they well deserve to 
 lose : had she not quoted from the poets and the philosophers of 
 a thousand years, to prove by a thousand lines of wisdom that 
 it is ' not under our control to love or n(jt to love : ' and was 
 this not most supreme truth ? 
 
 Why then in face of the first faithlessness whicli she had
 
 OTHMAR. 387 
 
 ever known, had she had no better or wiser mipulse in her than 
 that of anger ? — such stupid, witless, unwise anger, as Jeanne in 
 the kitchens would feel against Jeannot in the stables. What 
 use were the most subtle intellect, the most delicate and pene- 
 trating perception, the most intimate and accurate knowledge of 
 human nature, if all these only resulted in producing, under 
 trial, such primitive instincts, and such simple emotions, as 
 would exist in the untutored brain and the rude breast of any 
 peasant woman passing under the trees of the park yonder with 
 her herd of milch cows, or her flock of sheep 1 If the higher 
 intelligence could not reach a nirvana of perfect tolerance, of 
 perfect comprehension, of perfect indifference, of what avail 
 were its culture and its pride % 
 
 All men were inconstant ; she knew that. It was not their 
 fault ; they were made so. She believed that, had he told her 
 frankly of his frailties, she would have been perfectly indifferent 
 and indulgent to them. It was the long deception and conceal- 
 ment which had seemed to her so contemptible. ' Such a coward 
 — such a coward ! ' she thought bitterly. Cowardice was to her 
 the one unpardonable sin. 
 
 As she and Bethune walked on the seventh evening before 
 dinner through the outer gardens, where these joined the woods, 
 they chanced to see in the distance the same Lubin and Lisette, 
 whom they had seen as lovers two years before, and who had 
 been wedded with many gifts and much gaiety in the August 
 weather a week or two after the sitting of the Court of Love. 
 The man was walking far ahead this time ; the woman lagged 
 behind ; the cows were the same happy creatures, serene and 
 mild, going through the sun and shadow, pausing to crop a 
 mouthful of sweet grass between the beechen banks ; but the 
 lovers were only now a lout who whistled and smoked, a scold 
 who fumed and wept. 
 
 ' Let us ask how the idyl ends,' said the Lady of Amyot. ' It 
 is easy to see that it is ended.' 
 
 'Ah, Madame,' said the woman being interrogated, ' roi7d 
 qyCil regarde dejd la petite Flore ! ' 
 
 Her chatelaine laughed with a certain bitter tone in her 
 laughter. 
 
 ' " Voila quHl regnrde dejd la petite Flore,^^ ' she repeated ; 
 * and she is so stupid that she knows no better than to be angry ! ' 
 
 Bethune glanced at her wistfully. After a moment's silence 
 he said in a low tone : 
 
 ' There are those who never look — elsewhere.' 
 
 She smiled, knowing his meaning, and touched by the 
 remembrance of his long constancy. 
 
 ' Ah, my dear friend,' she said, with some pang of conscience, 
 'I have had too much affection given me in my life, and perhaps 
 I have given too little.' 
 
 cc 2
 
 388 OTHMAR. 
 
 As she walked back through the gardens, under the long 
 arcades covered with tea roses and the banksian creepers, she 
 thought with that ridicule of herself, as of others, which wa» 
 always sure to succeed any emotion : 
 
 ' Nous roila en jjilein melodrame ! — the contrast of the hus- 
 band's infidelity makes the lover's fidelity touch the hard heart 
 of the deserted wife ! We are all grouijed ready for the stage of 
 the Gymnase ! ' 
 
 She seemed absiu'd to herself in her anger and her humiliation. 
 She had always been so contemptuous of life when it grew melo- 
 dramatic, although so impatient of it while it remained dull. 
 
 Othmar watched her cross the gardens from where he stood 
 in one of the windows of his library. Under the excuse of many 
 letters to dictate to his secretaries, he had escaped for awhile 
 from his guests. 
 
 It was near sunset, the light so clear and cool of earliest 
 spring was shining on the terraces and rose walks, and clipped 
 bay hedges of the garden to the south which had been left un- 
 altered from the Yalois time. The peacocks were mo\ang up 
 and down on the grass, the first swallows were wheeling above 
 the glowing colour of the azalea thickets, a light breeze was 
 blowing the spray of the fountains this way and that ; he 
 watched her as she came through the dewy green foliage and 
 under the white and yellow tea roses ; she wore a gown of white 
 velvet, she had a high ivory handled cane, there was a white grey- 
 hound before her, and the graceful figure of Bethune at her side. 
 He saw her gather one of the Marechal Niel roses above her 
 head, and fasten it in the bosom of her dress ; Bethune said 
 something to her ; she gathered another and let him take it. 
 
 Othmar watched them with a pang. 
 
 ' If I died to-morrow I suppose she would give him her hand 
 as she gives him that rose ! ' he thouglit, and the thought was 
 intolerable to him. ' She thinks me faithless to her, and she 
 does not care ; she was angered for an instant ; only that ; then 
 her daj's pass on the same ; she has all lier courtiei's and friends 
 about her ; she does not need me, or miss me amongst tliem.' 
 
 And he watched her with eyes which studied her incompar- 
 able grace, her divine languor, her indolent movements, as 
 though he saw them then for the first time ; so great a quickener 
 of sleeping love is the sting of a jealous fear. 
 
 But his heart was very weary. She had wounded, insulted, 
 injured him, well nigh beyond forgiveness; she had dishonoured 
 him with the secret observation of his actions and the open 
 accusation of his falsehood. She had had him followed and 
 tracked like a criminal, and had refused to believe his word, 
 which all Europe honoured as the surety of unimpeached truth. 
 
 Greater insult surely no woman could do to any man. 
 
 And yet, if she would only say one word, he felt that he wa» 
 ready to forget that she had done so ; he was ashamed of his own
 
 OTHMAR. 389 
 
 weakness, but he knew that he would forgive everything : — and 
 he reminded himself of his own offences to her without ex- 
 tenuation, willing to find in blame of himself excuse for herself. 
 
 He watched her now as sbe came slowly and smiling under 
 the trellis of the roses : to look at her it seemed that she had 
 no care, no regret, no desire. 
 
 ' And if I went out and shot myself to-night,' he thought, as 
 he watched the two figures jjass on under the trellised roses, ' she 
 would have called Bethune to console her before the y ear was out?' 
 
 He believed it ; but, man-like, the belief only gave her a 
 stronger dominion over him. 
 
 He thought of some verses which he had read not long 
 before, written by that poet who, more perfectly than any other, 
 mirrors the dissatisfaction, the wistfulness, the intricate emotions, 
 the unsatisfied passions of our time. 
 
 Que n'ai-je a te soumettre, ou bien a t'obeir ? 
 Je te vouerais ma force ou te la feiais craindre : 
 Esclave ou niaitre, au moins je te pourrais contraindre 
 A me sentir ta chose, ou bien ^ me hair. 
 
 J'aurais un jour connu I'insolite plaisir, 
 D'allumer dans ton coeur des soifs ou d'c-n eteindre, 
 De t'etre necessaire ou terrible, et d'atteindre, 
 Bon gre, nial gre, le coeur j usque la sans de'sir. 
 
 Esclave on maltre, au moins j'entrerais dans ta vie, 
 Par mes soins captivee, a mon joug reservee, 
 Tu ne pourrais me fuir, ni me laisser partir. 
 
 Mais je meurs sous tes yeux, loin de ton etre intime, 
 Sans meme oser crier, car ce droit, du martjT, 
 Ta douceur impeccable en frustre ta victime. 
 
 For seven years he had been always the nominal, sometimes 
 the actual, possessor of her life, and yet he had never once 
 known whether this woman whom he had possessed had ever 
 had one moment of what could be called love for him ! Many 
 women had loved him for whom he had felt nothing ; but by one 
 of those strange and melancholy ironies of which life is so full 
 the only women he had loved — the courtezan who had ruined 
 his boyhood, and his wife who had ruined his manhood — had 
 given themselves to him, without love. 
 
 He shut the window at which he stood, and turned away 
 with a bitter sigh : — without her life would be for ever valueless 
 to him. 
 
 Nadege and her servitor, unconscious of his observation of 
 them, entered the house ; it was the moment when people 
 gathered in the conservatories for tea ; the most pleasant hour 
 of the twenty-four was spent thus amongst the flowers ; often 
 there was music in the music-room adjoining ; the children 
 usually came there with their pretty grace and gaiety, their long 
 loose hair, their bright costumes, looking like larger butterflies 
 under the fronds of the palms.
 
 390 OTHMAR. 
 
 As she went towards her own apartments to rest there a little 
 while before joining her guests and friends in the orchid-houses, 
 one of her confidential servants brought her a note which 
 had been sent by liand from Beaugency, and was marked urgent. 
 She was about to send it unopened to her secretary, for letters 
 wearied her and she seldom read them herself unless their super- 
 scription told her that they were of some especial interest, when 
 she saw written in the corner of the envelope the name of 
 Rosselin. She knew that it was the name of the great artist who 
 had been the teacher of Damaris Berarde. 
 
 She took the packet with her to her own rooms and once 
 alone there opened it. There were two letters inside it. One 
 was written in a feeble unformed hand, the words were ill- 
 shaped, and the lines were uneven. The fingers which had 
 traced them had never been very skilful in the management of 
 the pen, being more used to guide the tiller ropes of a boat, or 
 the handle of a scythe. 
 
 The characters were ill-writ and very pale, but she could 
 read them ; she knew even without reading them, that thej" cam© 
 from Damaris ; they were brief : 
 
 ' When you get this, Madame, I shall not be living. Then I 
 think you will not be angered any more, and you will believe. 
 Do not let him know, because it would pain him. I mean, do 
 not let him learn that I sought this death myself. Perhaps it 
 was wrong, but I saw no other way ; I could not live any longer 
 on his charity now that I know. Before, I did not know. I 
 could not bear to live either without seeing him sometimes, and 
 I should never see him. Nothing wants me except the dogs, 
 and they will be happy on the farm here. My master would 
 only be disappointed m me if I lived. The world would not care 
 for me. I should not have any strength in me to make it care. 
 I used to think that I had genius, but it is all dead in me, quit© 
 dead now ; — perliaps it was only imagination, and the wisli to b© 
 something I was not, and the mere love I had of the poets. 
 Forgive me that I write to you ; I want to beg you to believe. 
 I would have given my life for him, but he never thought of m© 
 in that way. I pray you to make him happier. I wish I could 
 have seen him once .' 
 
 The ill-written words ended abruptly, as though the pen 
 which had written tliem had suddenly fallen from a hand toa 
 weak to hold it any more. 
 
 On an outside sheet was written in the fine clear writing of 
 Rosselin : 
 
 ' She died last night as the moon rose. I write to you, 
 Madame, instead of to your husband by her desire. You will 
 tell him as much or as little as you choose. I had not seen lier 
 for four days. God pardon me for it ! I shall never pardon 
 myself. I had left her in anger because I could not persuade her 
 to play before you at Amyot, and in anger I had stayed away
 
 OTHMAR. 391 
 
 from her. When tliey sent for me I found her already dying. 
 The woman of the house tokl me tiiat she had been one day 
 alone to Paris, and what had been done to her there this woman 
 did not know, but on her return she was quite silent, and very 
 feverish and strange. She wandered about the village and the 
 fields, and would scarcely come into the house to bed. At one 
 of the cottages a young child she had often played with was 
 lying ill with diiihtheria. Damaris remained day and night 
 with him, and when he was dying kissed him on the mouth : 
 she never confessed it to me, but I believe that she sought 
 death that way, for I think life for some reason or other which 
 I know not had become wholly intolerable to her. She sufi'ered 
 very much. I brought her all the aid that science could give 
 her, but it was of no avail. She had no wish to live, I think. 
 She talked often of her island, and of the sea, and of the boats. 
 Latterly she could not speak at all, then she wrote to you. It is a 
 hideous death : heaven spare you and yours the like. You feel 
 no sorrow for anything they say, but I think you would have 
 been sorry for her. Perhaps it is best so. The world would 
 have broken her heart ; it has no place in it for such dreams as 
 hers were. To the last she bade me never to let your husband 
 know. Her last thought was of him. He was very good to her, 
 but a worse man would perhaps have injured her genius less. I 
 know not what passed between her and j'ou. I only know that 
 she had seen you. Whether -'ou said anything which made her 
 despair of living I cannot tell ; all she said when she became 
 delirious, wliich she did become towards the end, was only this 
 always: "She will believe now, she will believe now." Sol 
 suppose you doubted her. I send you the few lines which she 
 wrote three hours before she died when she could scarcely see. 
 I have not read them myself. I think she would not wish me 
 to do so. I am over eighty years old ; it is hard to live so long 
 only to see the last thing that one loves 2;)erish miserably. But 
 she had genius, and the world hates it, so perhaps after all it is 
 best as it is.' 
 
 She put the letters down, one on anniher, and her face had 
 a great blankness of horror on it. Like Yseulte, this child had 
 died for him, through her. 
 
 She shuddered as with cold in the warm fragrant air of her 
 room, and large tears sprang into her eyes. 
 
 She could not doubt now. 
 
 She locked her doors, and no one entered there for an 
 hour. 
 
 CHAPTER LIY. 
 
 Whex that time had passed she descended the grand staircase 
 and joined her friends in the conservatories ; the tea roses
 
 392 OTHMAR. 
 
 renewed in the white velvet of her corsage, the great pearls 
 lying on her white soft breast. No one was aware of anything 
 changed in her manner or aspect. Twice or thrice she looked 
 nervously at the doors ; that was all ; she was afraid of seeing 
 her husband enter. 
 
 When he came she looked away from him, and Blanche de 
 Laon, who was near her, saw a certain tremor on her lips, and 
 thought with victorious pleasure, though uncertain of the cause : 
 (^a vous blesse, hein ? (Ja voits blesse ? 
 
 At the long dinner she was somewhat silent and absorbed, 
 but her world was used to her caprices, and knew that she was 
 seldom pleased long. Men endeavoured all the more to amuse 
 her. They thought that they succeeded. They did not know 
 that instead of the brilliant room, the faces of her friends, the 
 flowers and fruits of the table, and the frescoes of the walls, she 
 only saw a little low dark chamber with a girl dying miserably 
 in it, like a strangled dog, as the moon rose. 
 
 She had never believed in saci'ifice or in remorse, or if 
 forced to believe in them she had said with disdain, ' What 
 melodrama ! ' But she believed now. 
 
 Shame and remorse approached the delicate hauteur of her 
 life and touched it for the first time. What she had thought so 
 low had humbled her. 
 
 The dinner seemed very long to her, the evening slow to 
 pass ; the burden of the world can be at times as heavy as the 
 travail of the poor ; there were the usual pastimes, and wit, 
 and gaiety ; Paul of Lemberg was there, and the ineffable 
 sweetness of his music thrilled through the flower-scented air ; 
 people laughed low, and played high, and made love in shadowy 
 cornel's ; it was all pretty, and graceful, and amusing. But 
 she, amidst it all, only heard a voice which cried to her : 
 
 ' Why will you not believe ? ' 
 
 She only saw a grave made in dark wet earth, and a girl's 
 body thrust into it in cruel haste, and sods thrown in one on an- 
 other on the lifeless limbs, the dull hair, the disfigured throat ; 
 it was horrible — horrible ! Why ]iad she not left her alone in 
 the gay sunshine, under the orange trees, by the blue water ] 
 
 With all the pressure and the distraction of societj' upon her 
 she was endlessly pursued by the self-accusation which liad been 
 brought to her by those simple lines traced by a dying child. 
 
 A consciousness of the supreme good fortune with which 
 fate had always lightened her own life, came to her, for the 
 first time, with a sense of unworthiness and ingratitude in her- 
 self. A consciousness of the greatness of the gifts she liad 
 received, and of the little she had given in return, smote her 
 heart with a vague repentance and a vague fear. What had 
 she done with all those lives wliicli had been put into her liunds, 
 with all the loyalty and the devotion which had been spent on 
 her oftentimes, without receiving from her even a passing pity
 
 OTHMAR. 393. 
 
 in recognition of it % Would not life tire one day of blessing 
 her, when she gave no benediction in return ? 
 
 She had always cared so little, she had been always so in- 
 different and so dissatisfied. Would fate not strike her with a 
 rough, wild justice, if it took from her her children, her hus- 
 band, her intellect, her fortune, her beauty % Would not 
 destiny be only fair and honest if it forced her on her knees 
 beside some death-bed of some creature well-beloved, and said 
 to her : — 
 
 ' You have never been content in happiness ; henceforward 
 you shall dwell with soitow.' 
 
 Fear touched her for the sole time in her victorious and 
 indifferent life ; she was afraid lest one day she should stand 
 alone with only the graves of what had been once dear to her 
 as her companions and her friends : one day when youth and 
 
 power and beauty and wit would all be gone from her : like 
 
 the great sovereigns of the world, she shuddered to remember 
 that she was mortal. 
 
 With all her philosoj^hy and epigram, she had discoursed 
 full many a time of the only cruel certainty life holds : the cer- 
 tainty that toxit lasse, tout casse, tout passe. She had played 
 with the dread problems which Time, the merciless master of 
 the highest, sets before all his scholars with no solution to them 
 possible to the clearest brains. And whilst she had toyed with 
 their subtleties, this child had had the courage to cut the knot 
 and pass away for ever to the eternal night of nothingness ! 
 
 Some perception of the utter selfishness of her whole exist- 
 ence smote her as she sat alone in the stillness of the after- 
 midnight hours. 
 
 These children dwarfed her in her own sight. They had 
 been mere children, both of them, foolish, romantic, unwise, 
 exaggerated : but they had been in a way sublime. And he 
 had loved neither of them. He had only loved her who had 
 left his heart empty, his affections cold, his life dissatisfied and 
 solitary. 
 
 For the first time since she had thought at all, a passionate 
 repentance and regret came on her ; a sense of her own cruelty 
 weighed heavily upon her. Why had she not been more 
 tolerant, more merciful, more willing to acknowledge that inno- 
 cence and generosity of which she had been so unwillingly con- 
 scious all the while that Damaris Berarde had stood before her ? 
 Why had she not been guided by that serenity and tolerance of 
 judgment on which she had so long prided herself ; why had 
 she crushed to the earth with the weight of her scorn, and her 
 rank, and her place as his wife, this lonely creature who had 
 loved him so humbly, so silently, so perfectly ? 
 
 There was a greatness in her own nature, obscured as it 
 was by the languors of self-love and the vanities of the world, 
 which forced her to recognise the greatness of the simple worda
 
 394 OTHMAR. 
 
 sent to her. She herself, in her anger, in her incredulity, in 
 her cruelty, seemed to her own eyes very poor beside them. 
 She had judged as the common herd always judged : coarsely, 
 superficially, brutally. No better. 
 
 She was humbled in her own eyes. The sentimentalists 
 had conquered tliroughout, they had been greater than she ! 
 
 Poor Mignon, with her heart breaking in a love which she 
 dared not avow, which no one Avanted ! 
 
 A few kmd words might have saved her ; might have healed 
 the bruised child's heart and made it strong for the burden of 
 life ; and she had not spoken those words. 
 
 If she had read this story in a book of poems, if she had 
 seen it mifolded on the scene of a pastoral as of an opera, it would 
 have touched her ; but as it had been in real life she had not 
 cared ; because the living, throbbing, aching nerves had been 
 alive before her she had not cared ; she had turned away, and 
 had left them to bleed to death as they would — as they might. 
 
 A sense of guilt was upon her. She felt as though she had 
 killed some humble, wounded animal which had crept to her 
 feet for safety. She had always declared that genius was sacred 
 to her ; and now she had dealt with it as a mere common 
 noxious thing, and driven it away from her to perish. 
 
 ' And we are such wretched shallow egotists,' she thought. 
 ' I grieve for her now, and I know that she has been greater 
 than I shall ever be, and I know that we have killed her — he 
 and I and the world which had no place for her ; and yet how 
 often shall I remember her, how often shall I be gentler to 
 others for her sake % — once or twice, whilst the memory of her 
 is warm perhaps — no more ; one has no time.' 
 
 Rosselin would remember every hour of all such few days 
 as might remain to him on earth ; but no one else. 
 
 ' Oh, foolish child,' she thought, ' to die for that ! '^i^^ly not 
 have lived, and reigned over the soids of men, and put a curb 
 on the slavering mouth of the fawning world ! It is never 
 worth an hour of sacrifice.' 
 
 Yet all overwrought, unwise, useless, as such sacrifice was, 
 it had a nobility in it which awed her, and a generosity wliich 
 made her own egotism seem poor and pale beside it. 
 
 ' Make him happier.' 
 
 The unselfish prayer of the dead girl touched her conscience 
 and her heart as no rebuke would ever have done. She had 
 the power to do so stiU ; that she did not doubt. He was hers 
 in every way if she chose to stretch her hand out to him. 
 
 A sense of the infinite patience, and fidelity, and devotion 
 of the great love which he had always borne her from the first ' 
 hour his eyes had met hers came to her with the force of a 
 reproach from the grave itself. His submission to her caprices, 
 his constancy under her neglect, his instant response to tiie 
 faintest kindness from her, his unchangeable tenderness which
 
 OTHMAR. • 395 
 
 outlived the many mortal wounds she dealt to it ; all these came 
 to her memory with a sense of her own debt to them, of their 
 own sweetness and patience, and longsuftering. In him she 
 could if she chose find a friend, whom no fault of hers would 
 alienate, and no passing of time make weary. She had had 
 too much love given to her in her life ; she saw that she had 
 been too careless of this, the greatest gift life holds : and death 
 had come too often where she passed. 
 
 The chill of its ghastly presence seemed with her as she 
 moved through the silent house in the still small hours. This 
 child had had force in her youth to seek death, but she feared 
 it : she who had feared nothing on earth or in heaven. 
 
 When all the guests were gone to their chambers, and the 
 great house was still, she did what she had never once done in 
 the years of their marriage : she went to seek Othmar instead 
 of sending her women to summon him. She had on her pale 
 rose satin chamber-gown, and even in that moment, with an 
 impulse of care for her person and its charms, a coquetry which 
 would never cease in her whilst she had breath, she paused a 
 moment before one of the mirrors, and glanced lingeringly at 
 her own reflection, and put some fresh roses in her bosom. 
 Had she been on her way to the scaffold she would have done 
 the same : had the same remembrance of her own power to 
 charm. 
 
 As she passed one of the great windows of the hall, she 
 looked at the night without. The moon, which rose late, 
 being on its decline, poured its whole light over the gardens and 
 the forests beyond. A white owl flew through the clear air ; the 
 shadow of the great palace fell black over the silvered grass, 
 distant bells for daybreak prayer were ringing very far away 
 over the hushed country. 
 
 And the night before, ' as the moon rose,' Damaris Berarde 
 had died in her narrow chamber, in all her beauty and strength, 
 in all the height of her dreams and hopes, in all the vigorous 
 promise of life which had been as full and as fair in her as was 
 now the promise of spring in the woods : and these were all 
 gone for ever and for ever, the body laid in the earth to perish, 
 and the tender and valiant soul passed away like a dew that 
 dries up before the heats of the noonday. 
 
 ' Heaven spare such death to you and yours ! ' 
 
 She remembered the words with the first sense of terror her 
 nature had ever known. They seemed less like a prayer for 
 good than like a menace of evil. She thought of the fair lives 
 of her children : not fairer than had been this other young life 
 which she had first seen under the starry orange flowers above 
 the edge of the sea. 
 
 Why could she not have left her alone ? 
 
 She passed through the length of the quiet building to her 
 husband's rooms. He was writing at a writing-table with his
 
 396 OTHMAR. 
 
 back turned to her, and did not raise his head at the sound of 
 the unclosing door. 
 
 But as the sweet rose-scent came towards him on the air, a 
 consciousness of her presence came with it : he started violently 
 and rose to his feet. He was very pale as he bowed low before 
 her, then stood waiting for her to speak. She was silent some 
 moments. 
 
 To her temper so imperious, so arrogant, so indifferent, to 
 praise or blame, it was not without great effort that she could 
 say what she had come to say. 
 
 A strong emotion moved her. She had never believed it 
 possible for her conscience to pain her, for her heart to ache 
 with self-reproach, as they did now. 
 
 ' Make him happier.' 
 
 The childish words haunted her. After all, what had she 
 ever given him in return for the supreme devotion of his life ? 
 A few hours of physical ecstasy ; and years of indifference, 
 mockery, and neglect. 
 
 'Make him happier.' 
 
 To her critical intelligence and satiated mind, happiness in 
 such simple reading of the word could not exist; it needed faith, it 
 needed ignorance, it needed youth ; it is never possible to those 
 whose passions demand what nothing mortal can satisfy. Yet 
 some reparation she knew she might still give to him ; some 
 gentleness, some sympathy, some response. These children 
 who had loved him so well should not have died wholly in 
 vain. 
 
 She leaned towards him, and the fragrance of the roses in 
 her breast swept with dreamy sweetness over him. 
 
 ' I came to ask your pardon,' she said in a low voice. ' I 
 wronged you, I insulted you ' 
 
 He bowed low, and his lips, as they touched her hand, were 
 very cold. 
 
 'Pardon is no word between you and me,' he said wearily. 
 ' How could you doubt me ? Had I ever lied to you, or to 
 any OH e ? ' 
 
 ' No : I was wrong. 
 
 Her proud mouth trembled. 
 
 ' How much or how little shall I tell him ? ' she thought ; 
 * men are such children ! ' 
 
 He looked at her with hesitation ; and a great and sudden 
 joy touched his life. 
 
 ' Do you love me at all, then ? ' he said with wonder and 
 with doubt. 
 
 She smiled a little : her old slight mysterious smile ! 
 
 ' I suppose so — since 1 doubted you. Love is always blind ! ' 
 
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 30 
 
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 Haunted Hotel. 
 The Fallen Leaves. 
 JezebersDaughter* 
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 Heart and Science 
 
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 Miss or Mrs.? 
 
 New Magdalen. 
 
 The Frozen Deep. 
 
 Law and the Lady. "1 Say No. 
 
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 Seth's Brother's Wife. 
 
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 A Hard Knot. 
 Heart's Delight. 
 
 Robin Gray. 
 For Lack of Gold. 
 What will the 
 
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 CHATTO «• W INDUS, PICCADILLY. 
 
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 The World Well Lost. 
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 IVIisslVlisanthrope 
 Donna Quixote. 
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 Camiola. 
 
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 LInley Rochford. 
 
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 Gerald. 
 
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 Women are Stranga. 
 
 The Hands of Justice.
 
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 Grace Balmaign's Sweetheart. 
 Schools and Scholars. 
 
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 Guy Waterman. | Two Dreamers. 
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 Joan Merryweather. 
 Margaret and Elizabeth. 
 The High Mills. 
 Heart Salvage. I Sebastian. 
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 Mary Jane Married. 
 
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 Tales for the Marines. 
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 Diamond Cut Diamond. 
 
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 The American Senator. 
 Frau Frohmann. | Marlon Fay. 
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 Mr. Scarborough's Family. 
 The Land-Leaguers. 
 The Golden Lion of Granpere. 
 John Caldigate. 
 
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 Anne Furness. | Mabel's Progress. 
 
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 Farnell's Folly. 
 
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 Stories from Foreign Novelists. 
 
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 Tom Sawyer. | A Tramp Abroad. 
 
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 A Pleasure Trip on the Continent 
 
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 The Stolen White Elephant. 
 Huckleberry Finn. 
 Life on the Mississippi. 
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 Mistress Judith. 
 
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 ANONYMOUS. 
 Paul Ferroll. 
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 Our Sensation Novel. Edited by 
 
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