Othmar. Ouida
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 her that there are other fates possible for a young Hebe with the brows of Athene.'
'That would be a cruel 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; the 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 before, 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 contentment?'
'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? Besides, 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 he is a good-tempered man and a very laborious worker. On the whole, worse things might happen to Damaris Bérarde than to live always on her island and rear her children there, as she now rears her poussins and her puppies.'
'That is looked at from a very low plane, Monsignor; unusually 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. 'Decidedly 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 Bernardin 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 endimanchées they are horrible.'
'She does not belong to "those people,"' said Melville, a little impatiently. 'Her mother was an actress of Paris. I think you might dress her how you would, she would look well. She has a patrician look like those girls of Magna Grecia, who are as ignorant as the stones they tread, but have the port of goddesses.'
'I will see this especial young goddess,' said Nadine, who never relinquished a whim when it encountered opposition.
Melville was seriously annoyed.
'Will you make Gros Louis more acceptable to her?' he said angrily.
'No; we shall make him impossible.'
'You will create one more déclassée, then, when there are already so many!'
'What? By seeing her once?'
'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 hands with king and pope. It is nothing new, though modern democracy thinks it is.'
'The just ambition of the man of genius is not the restless monomania of the déclassée.'
'Who can tell what ambition may lie under this Phrygian cap?' said his tormentor, as she looked 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 involuntary 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 flame before than after.'
'There are a great many lives,' said Melville, with 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 experience 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, such a mere whim as this would most likely expire as soon as conceived. He said nothing more to her, and Loswa took his sketch down from the easel.
'I fear you are angry with me, Monsignor,' he murmured to Melville, to whom he was always courteous and deferential. 'Indeed, but for the challenge that Madame Nadège cast at me, I should not have ventured to find out your inviolate isle.'
'There is no harm done,' said Melville curtly. 'You will not find there either Gretchen or Graziella.'
Othmar had no sympathy with this new fancy.
'With 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 hardly anything 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 Aimée Desclée—a Rachel.'
'And do you think it is better to be a Desclée than to live and die, a happy wife and mother, en bonne bourgeoise?'
'Oh, my dear, it is you who are bourgeois if you see anything enviable in the prose of Fate! You may be sure that, if she be a genius, and I help to open her prison doors, I am only the instrument of Destiny. Someone else would open them if not I.'
'I thought you always ridiculed the idea of Destiny?'
'For ordinary mortals-yes. But genius is accompanied by the Parcæ. 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 déclassée happy. Melville is quite right.'
'A déclassée! My dear Otho, what a very conventional reply. A déclassée 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