Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 636
‘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 wall 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 commonplace. That sketch is so admirable because it is no trick: it was a genuine inspiration of the moment. Loswa was never so natural before or since.’
He spoke indifferently, but he was looking at her with concealed anxiety. Perchance it was a propitious hour in which to tell her of the fate of Damaris.
‘Do you ever think of that child?’ he said abruptly.
‘Of what child?’ she asked.
‘Of the one for whom you predicted the future of Desclée?’ he answered with a movement of his hand towards the picture.
She looked at the portrait with an effort 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 forgetfulness 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 interested you, and whom you took home one night over the sea in a most romantic fashion. What of her? Has she married her shipwright? Was it a shipwright? 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 silversmith’s!’
‘I told you once before she did not marry the boat-builder — the shipwright, as you call him. You made it impossible for 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 pied de la lettre. If you had had a little amourette with a fisher-girl it would argue 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 disappointed and relieved at the failure of his effort. Damaris was not even a recollection to her; she had caused the uprooting 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 touched by so many supplicants whom she passed, not seeing them, so many whose eyes were fastened on her in envy and in wonder, that a poor little barbarian 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 would 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 temper. Time would tell her, if ever her forgotten Desclée should become one of those on whom the fierce light of the world’s fame beat; whilst if the life of Damaris should pass away in failure, in obscurity, in the paths of privacy, what would it ever be to her? 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 sympathy with impotence; the unsuccessful were to her eyes the born crétins 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?
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 I 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 her, what does she care what I do?’
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, that 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 affect 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 dissensions, which will annoy me, his whole temper is so utterly unphilosophic. He cannot understand 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?’
She had been wearied by his romantic ideas and by his unpractical aspirations, which suggested to her only more ennui than the world, stupid as it was, afforded her already. Yet she was irritated by her own latent consciousness that she should not care to know that his dreams went elsewhere.
‘Comme cette fille lui trotte dans la tête!’ she said, half aloud, with surprise and irritation. Her knowledge of men told her that remembrance with them usually means attraction, that irritation usually means some secret consciousness, some unspoken interest.
Languidly she recalled from the depths of her own memory the trivial, long-forgotten incident of Damaris Bérarde, 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 Rothschild, or gone to a conference with Bleichrœder? Would she care much? She thought not. She would feel that half good-natured disdain which a woman, passionless herself, always feels for the riotous passions of men; but she did not think that 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 own 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 confidence, 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 masters of their intelligence.
For the whole ways of life of a man she had that contempt which a woman who reads their hearts and knows their follies is apt lo entertain when to herself the senses say little, and their gratification is indifferent. 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 that at 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 whole 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 were greatest in art. Belonging, 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?’
Loswa reflected a moment, then he answered with perfect candour:
‘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 lost sight 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 that you have never had the curiosity to inquire?’
‘I really never have. She was certainly a provincial beauty, but they are not the beauties which dwell longest in my mind. I intended to make something très empoignant 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 composer 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 the theatre applaud, but himself 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 with the country! And then the farewell to Naomi —— I 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 the tonic art which were united in her to the most subtle appreciation of its phases. The ‘Ruth’ had charmed her ear, and her mind could distinguish why it did so.
Béthune, 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 Les 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 likely 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 interest, 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 him first with amazement, then with anger.
He knew none of the circumstances which had brought Damaris Bérarde to Paris. She preserved an obstinate silence in regard to herself, and his good breeding would not allow him to put direct questions to her which were evidently unwelcome ones. It was only in the village that he heard 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 investigation, 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 he 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 unsatisfied and repelled, Béthune was too loyal a lover to see anything. 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 commonplace 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 Nadège now speak of Damaris Bérarde 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.
‘Who would have believed that even she would fail to secure constancy?’ he thought as he watched the light play upon the rings upon her hand as she gave back her cup to Loswa.
‘You look interested in my inquiries,’ said Nadine, observing 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 Béthune in haste, with a certain embarrassment 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 handsome 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 he looks innocent.’
‘You never heard anything of her?’ asked Béthune, conscious 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 when one saw her close; she kept blinking in the light of my dancing-rooms like a little owl out at 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 in 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.’
