Othmar. Ouida
I am just in the mood to play at being a benefactress, and you all oppose my charitable inclinations. To-morrow I may not be in the humour.'
'Precisely,' said Béthune. '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 Béthune. 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 nightingale had, made the old remembered poetry come thronging in her brain and trembling on her lips as she spoke of it.
'If, after all, I have talent?' she thought, 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 after generation of children have spoken since the young disciples of the early years of St. Cyr first wept over the perils of the Jewish heroine, were amongst those which most touched her heart and pleased her imagination. 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 déclare:
C'est lui, c'est le ministre infidèle et barbare
Qui, d'un zèle trompeur à vos yeux revêtu,
Contre notre innocence arma votre vertu.
Et quel autre, grand Dieu! qu'un Scythe impitoyable
Aurait de tant d'horreurs dicté l'ordre effroyable?
and passed on to the passage,
O Dieu, confonds l'audace et l'imposture!
At first her timidity was so great that she was almost inaudible, but at the fifth and sixth lines the charm which the words possessed for her began to absorb her thoughts, to take her out of herself into the region of poetic feeling, to spur and stimulate and strengthen her. Nature had given her tones full of tenderness and power, and capable of many varying emotions, and the dramatic instinct, which was either inherited or innate in her, made her give wholly unconsciously the just expression, the true emphasis, the accent which best aided the meaning of the verse, and best shaped its harmonies 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 have recited the whole of the play with ease, so familiar to her were the lines of all the few volumes she possessed. Night after night, in her little balcony, when everyone slept except herself and the nightingales, she had declaimed the speeches sotto voce for her own delight, living for the hour in the scenes they suggested, 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 approbation 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, with 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 sensitive!' murmured her visitant a little impatiently. 'You see, my dear Duke!—it is Aimée Desclée, not Rachel; Adrienne Lecouvreur, not Mlle. Mars.'
'The greater pity then to take her from her orange-groves,' answered Béthune. '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 uplifted head and questioning face of Clovis, who had come upward to inspect the strangers.
'If Esther can move her so greatly,' said Nadine with her little ironical smile, 'what will Dona Sol do and Marion de l'Orme?'
'I do not think,' said Béthune, '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 discovering that you have a snake in your breast and eternal life in your hand.'
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; I 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 amazement.
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 fête-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 with 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 mainland—— 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 controlled 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.