Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 646
Blanchette continued to gaze at her with unsparing examination, and Loswa continued to make to her those pretty speeches of graceful compliment of which he was a finished master. She grew angered and stubborn under the eye of the one and deaf and contemptuous to the flatteries of the other. Why had they come? When would they depart? These were the only two questions in her thoughts.
She was troubled, too, by the abrupt mention of Othmar, and uncertain what she ought to say, how she should reply. If only Rosselin 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 ignorance and of childish audacity. Life seemed now very difficult 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. Dame! 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 every year. Has she seen you again? You ought to let her see you now.’
‘Who?’ said Damaris.
‘Who?’ said Blanchette, and muttered in her small white teeth ‘Ah! ça fait l’innocente, ça se pose! — —’
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 Bérarde. Allez-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 lait d’Iris and shadowed with kolh, as a warm morning on southern fields, where the sun shines on wine-hued wind flowers, is unlike a waxlit evening in a conservatory.
‘Paris has had nothing like her for ages,’ she thought. ‘But she is stupid; she does not know her own power; she lives on at a farm; if she waits for Othmar’s leave she will never be seen by the world; she does not understand; perhaps she mixes sentiment up with it; she has the head of a Sappho; that type is always romantic.’
‘Now he is gone,’ she said aloud. ‘Do not be afraid and do not pose. Tell me truly, has 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. Le jour est aux jeunes. I will use my power for you. You shall become great if my world can make you so, because she will suffer in seeing it. You must be great, I tell you; it is all very well to filer 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 talking or you will not hurt her in the least. I do not think she cares what affairs he may have, all that is beneath her; she will only care if you can oppose her de puissance à 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 our 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 behind 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 Crœsus; it will be your own fault if you are not the admiration of all Europe at a bound. Then she will hate you, and she will be wounded to the soul, and she will realise that her day is done; le jour est aux jeunes. 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 flush had come on 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 honesty of a genuine sentiment. Love she could not, but she could hate, and in all the cruelty and the wickedness of her there was thus much of candour and of feeling; she was true to the childish affections and the promised revenge of a day long gone by. Even as she spoke she was thinking of the poor little verses hidden with the dead roses in the drawer at Amyôt; even as she spoke she was saying in her heart, ‘My pure angel, I do not forget; better people than I forget, but I do not. She shall suffer 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 powerless 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 ear, 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: they 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 colour was hot in her face and her eyebrows were drawn together; a look of intense suffering 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 shrill 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, why 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 à la derobée under these ash trees. You are nothing now; you are only a little peasant whom it has pleased him to set in a dovecot — it does not matter to her even if she knows of it. But, if you triumph in the sight of all Paris, then it will wound her. If you be a second Desclée 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 which had followed each other so fast and in so impressive a whisper off her lips.
Damaris 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, the only expression on her face was that of a vague, half-stupid bewilderment which left her companion in the same doubt as before, as to whether she were stupid or feigning.
‘If she have no more intelligence than this,’ Blanche de Laon thought, impatiently, ‘how can they think to make her famous for all her beauty? To be sure, great artists are sometimes great imbeciles.’
She leaned still nearer till her eyes seemed to plunge themselves into those of Damaris; she had drawn off her gloves, and her thin small hands with their glittering rings were clasped on her riding whip where it lay on the 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 everything you wish; if you let time go by, Othmar will refuse you a piece of pinchbeck where now he would give you a river of diamonds. If you waste your best years living in obscurity to please him, he will recompense you by leaving you to obscurity all the rest of your days. Men never appreciate sacrifice. If he cannot do better for you than a room or two in a farmhouse, what use is it to you that he is worth millions of millions as he is? You are only a handsome child, only a handsome peasant; but if you 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 he 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 her voice ‘At first I did not know. I think you cannot understand. He saved me from the streets, as a man may a dog. He has been as an angel to me. He does not care for me except in pity. He loves her. I would give my body and my soul to him if he wished for them. But he does not. He is not mine in any way, nor will he ever be. You do not understand. If I could make him happy for one 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 sceptical 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 rôle which pays you best. I spoke to you in sincerity, and you answer me with a tissue of untruths. C’est bien du midi ça!’
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 effort. ‘Go!’
Blanche de Laon, who had never in her life known any impulse of submission or any sense of fear, was vaguely awed and touched into involuntary acquiescence. Her swift, ready, insolent, and cruel tongue was silent.
She was baffled 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 possibility 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 Othmar 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 believe 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 courtyard of the house.
‘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 Phædra and of Medea — no contemporary of yours or mine. Let her alone. She will not suit your canvas.’
‘Will she play at Amyôt?’
‘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 suggestions, had been scared and confounded by the sense of a great unintelligible passion, the nobility of which was incomprehensible to her, yet affected her with a dim sense of its strength and its strangeness.
Once she laughed aloud and turned to Loswa.
‘Desclée! Desclée never equalled Damaris Bérarde. What an incomparable actress the future will enjoy whether we get her to Amyôt 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 Desclée.’
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 which had 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.
‘They think that I live on his money, and that all I care for is that,’ she muttered with the sick sense of a loathsome imputation 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 the passion 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 degrading. Because she would have followed him to any fate with joy and with devotion, therefore was she most tortured, most outraged, by the supposition that she could regard him as the means to riches and to fame. Nothing on earth suffers so intensely 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 against the wall, sick at heart in her utter solitude, 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 dea Fortuna for genius, the very stars fight in their 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 had stood during the last words spoken by Blanche de Laon. She turned her head and looked at him, but without much recognition 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?’ said Rosselin, abruptly. ‘What have they done 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 could she have repeated what she had heard.
