Othmar. Ouida
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 Desclée was a tattered little Bohemian: but the one ruled the world, 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 are 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 exhilarating one, but il en vaut bien 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 jour, the bloom of a day.'
Melville had for once erred in his 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 Bonaventure.
The opposition of Melville, and of her husband, the attraction 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 never taken serious shape.
The master passion of her temperament remained the pleasure 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 them 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 physical 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. 'Tous les amoureux sont bêtes,' she had so often said, and so continually thought. Of all things which had bored her throughout her life the love of the male human animal had bored her the most.
But a complicated situation, a set of emotions on an ascending scale—a spectacle of troubled consciences and of disturbing elements—these 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 she used the most, she said to herself that she would have given nearly all she possessed to be for once 'empoignée' by an intense emotion.
Sometimes she would look at Othmar and think: 'It is not his fault; it has certainly not been his fault, and yet there has never been a second when 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. 'You want Mignon or Juliet for all that,' she had said to him once.
It amused her now; this fancy of that unknown little island lying hidden 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 'un type.' In the afternoon of the following day she sailed thither. Who could have hoped for an undiscovered isle on these crowded seas? She was accompanied by Béthune, 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 Desclée!' she said, as her yacht glided out of its harbour and bore southward through smooth sparkling sapphire waters.
'A name of melancholy omen,' said Gui de Béthune. 'Sometimes I think Aimée Desclée is the most pathetic figure of our century.'
'She was a sensitive, and she was a poitrinaire,' 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 Prometheus Unbound are only the consequence of a kind of disease. It is so consoling for us; who have no disease, perhaps, but have also, alas, no genius! That is why the world is so fond of the physiologists. They are the great consolers of all mediocrity.'
CHAPTER X.
Damaris was gathering oranges and carrying them to the packing-sheds. She was bearing an empty skip upon her head, and kicking one of the golden balls before her through the grass, when a woman, unlike 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 grass.
'I am sure you know me again?' said the sweetest and coldest of voices. 'I am come to apologise to you for my rudeness. 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 herself to grow ugly, awkward, coarse, foolish, everything 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.
'I am 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 cheeks scarlet.
Loswa had been unable to embarrass her, but a cruel confusion possessed her before this woman, who was so unlike herself, 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! She 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——I 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 difficulty finding 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 seeing the men who were present, only thinking of her own rough gown, of her tumbled hair, of the state of the