One evening in October Rosselin walked beside his pupil amongst the fields of Les Hameaux. She had had her lesson in elocution in the afternoon; a lesson in which he was inexorably hard to please, a very tyrant over all the minutiÆ of accent and of expression; and now in the walks at sunset he had relaxed into all that benignity and bonhomie which were most natural to him in the company of women and of children.

'I am afraid I do not please you,' she had said with some dejection.

'If you did not, my dear, do you think I would come thrice a week to Chevreuse to train you?' he answered. 'It is because you have exceeding natural talent, because you have uncommon gifts, a flexible and beautiful voice, quick perceptions, and that intuitive comprehension which is the innermost soul of art, that I deal with you harshly to compel you to acquire all that artificial treatment of your own powers which is absolutely indispensable to success. If I had not seen genius in you it would not have been merely to please Othmar that I would have told you to give yourself to art; I should have said to you, on the contrary: "Go and marry a farmer of La Beauce, spin and sew, and wear a silk gown on Sundays; have any number of children; be an ordinary woman in a word."'

'Marry a farmer of La Beauce!'

She coloured with indignation. Was it not what Othmar himself had said to her?

'It is not a life to be despised,' continued Rosselin. 'They live in corn as the crickets do. You, who are so fond of country things, would be happy enough if—if—you had never read Racine and Hugo, if you had not that fermentation of the fancy in you which seethes and stirs and smokes until out of it comes the wine of genius. The swallows cannot stay in the fields as the linnets do. There is something in them that makes them go when the hour is come. They do not know what it is; they obey an imperious instinct. They cannot stay if they would. They go blindly, and very often they drop down dead in mid-ocean, and never see the rose fields of Persia or the magnolia woods of Hindostan, as they meant to do; yet they go.'

Unknown to herself, a strong impulse moved her to prove to the wife of Othmar that the brin de gÉnie was hers; a true bough of laurel, not a spurious weed. The indifference and the oblivion of this, the first great lady she had ever seen, still remained in her memory with the sting of an affront which nothing could efface. The world was represented to her eyes by that one delicate, smiling, negligent, cruel critic, whom she passionately admired, whom she unconsciously challenged. The child had no vanity, but she had great pride; the pride of the aristocrat and the pride of the republican had been inherited by her, each stubborn as the other. Her pride had been wounded, and her ambition and her dreams excited. She knew that she might drop, like the tired swallow that crosses the sea, into the deep abyss of failure and oblivion; but, like the swallow, the instinct which moved her was irresistible.

Rosselin saw that it was so, and he was too utterly an artist in every fibre of his being to be able to prevail on himself to discourage her wholly. He believed that she would become the glory of the French stage; that very union of the strength of the peasant and the delicacy of the patrician, which was so marked in her physically and mentally, seemed to him to possess that rare originality which all those destined to be great in any art are stamped with from their birth. He did not admit to her how much he admired her, but when she recited to him at one lesson those passages which had been set to her at a previous one, he was secretly amazed at the justness of her reading of them, the accuracy of her rendering, and he marvelled where in her simple life, set between sea and sky as it had been, she had reached such understanding of the greatest utterances of great minds.

'Yet what a fool I am to wonder,' he thought a moment later. 'As if it were not always so with genius, or as if anything less than that ever could be genius.'

But he took care not to utter that word often to her. All he ever granted to her was that she might arrive at something, perhaps, if she studied hard; if she were resolute and yet humble; if she accepted all his corrections and instructions, and did her best to lose that southern accent which would send all Paris into Homeric laughter if it were ever heard upon any stage.

'It could only be permitted,' he added, 'if you were reciting Mireille.'

She did not know what he meant, but she listened to his pure and exquisite pronunciation, and did her uttermost docilely to acquire it, as to obey and execute all his teachings.

Then, when their lesson was over, not seldom he would unbend utterly, and strolling with her through the meadows, or sitting beneath the trelliswork of the porch with the rose leaves falling on his white hair, he would tell her the most wonderful and enchanting of stories, merely drawing all of them from the innumerable treasures of that wonder-horn, his own manifold experiences. He said not a word that would hurt her. All that would be learnt soon enough.

'J'en ai vu tant!' he would think often as he left the Croix Blanche in the warm evenings. He had seen the world devour so many, like the dragons that were fed on white flesh. But he fancied she would be one of those who bind the dragon, like St. Marguerite, and make it follow them slavishly.

She had strength in her, the strength of the old mountain race of BÉrarde. He knew nothing of those dead people who had ruled land and sea in the dark ages, and perished finally under the axe on the scaffold; but there were a vitality and a force in her which seemed to him destined to conquer where weaker natures gave way and failed.

Provided only, he thought, provided only that she would have as many passions as there were grains of sand on her own sea-shores, but amongst them all no real love.

Passion is the most useful of teachers to any artist; that he knew; but love is the destruction of all art. Mademoiselle Mars lived through a blaze of glory; Adrienne Lecouvreur died in her youth. Rosselin did not trouble himself about conventional morality. He took the world as he had found it. He respected this child's supreme innocence, and would not have sullied it by a breath; but, casting her horoscope, he would have given her the heart of Rachel, not that of DesclÉe, if he had had the power. It is better to be the tigress which preys than the hind which bleeds.

He was no cynic; he only knew the world well, and well knew what the world makes of women.

On est broyÉ, ou on broie les autres. There is no middle path for those who once have left the cool secluded ways of privacy and joined the crowd which pushes at the brazen gates of fame.

But still, to Rosselin, to have passed these gates seemed the perfection of human triumph.

'What all who are not artists underrate,' he said to Damaris, as they passed beside the round tower of the dovecote, 'is the artist's joy in the mere power of expression. It is a mistake to suppose that it is the ignis fatuus of celebrity which allures the young poet, the young musician, the young painter; that is very secondary with him. What overmasters him is the longing for the opportunity of expression; the besoin de se faire sentir, which is as powerful and imperious as the besoin d'aimer. I first played in a barn to villagers; I had a grand part, Robert Macaire; I was as perfectly happy as when I later on played at the FranÇais to emperors and their courtiers. It is the same delight as the lark feels in singing, as the swan feels in swimming, as the heron feels in slowly sailing through the air: the ecstasy in the expansion of natural powers. But the majority of men know nothing of that. The custom-house officer would not believe that Berlioz was composing music as he sat on a rock above the sea. They laughed in his face and said: "Where is your piano?" This is as far as the world goes; it understands the piano, but not the music which is mute in the soul.'

He rested as he spoke on a stone of what had once been the great 'abbey of the fields:' the fields were there unchanged, it was only the great thinkers whose brains were dust.

'I had no such romantic cradle as you possessed in your island of orange groves,' he continued. 'I was born in a little dusky, close, noisome shop in a back street of Vierzon, that dreary town of our dreary district of the Sologne. My grandfather had been born in that shop before me. Everything in it was poverty-stricken, ugly, vulgar, sordid; and vulgarity is so much worse than any ugliness, and sordid small aims and hopes are so much worse than any poverty! Of course no one need be ignoble in a shop, even in a shop where they sell tallow. I suppose Garibaldi was not, but my people were. Well, in that little stuffy plebeian den, only frequented by the lowest of the ironworkers and the canal bargemen, beautiful fancies thronged on me and noble visions haunted me, as they did you in your sea-girt orange thickets, and I used to sit in my hideous attic and recite verse to the one star which was all I could see through a chink in the wall, as you did, you tell me, to the whole of the southern skies glowing above your balcony. It was not fame that I wanted; I never thought of it; I longed to hear my own voice in the glory of the words; I longed to leap up and shout to all the sleeping town; I longed to cry out to the Immortals, wherever they were, "I have understood you, I am not unworthy!" Ah, those beautiful impersonal enthusiasms of youth! Fame! It is of nothing so narrow or so selfish that we think!'

The tears rose to his eyes: half a century and more had rolled away from him; he was a boy again, dreaming his dreams as he wandered over the sandy wastes of the Sologne.

'Ah, my dear,' he said with a sigh, 'how miserable I thought I was in that little ugly house, with the sluggish canal water slipping past its walls, and the black-faced iron puddlers quarrelling over my father's short weight! It stifled me; it cramped me; it killed me! so I thought. But I got away from it, nevertheless. Pegasus came for me in the shape of a towing-horse, which carried me away to Issoudun first, and to a new life afterwards. I had the seven lean years as a strolling player; a jack at a pinch, a Jean-qui-rit or a Jean-qui-pleure, as it was wanted; and then I had more than thrice over the seven fat years, and all that men call success. I have had all the best things that there are in life, and I do not think I should have had as many of them if I had remained in the dingy little shop all my days, as my father wished me to do. Poor old father! he came to see me once in Paris—once, when I was thirty years old, and in the height of my best triumphs; and he was dazzled and dazed, and did not very well understand, but he found out that my servants charged me four times too much a pound for candles. "Un grand homme toi!" he said, with a sneer at me, "et tu n' sais pas le prix d'une bougie!" The world admired me: he never did. I was always to him a fool who burned wax instead of tallow. There is always something to be said for the bourgeois point of view; but it is narrow—narrow. After all, the storms and sunshine on Parnassus are better than the worry over a lost centime in the back parlour. I have been a successful artist in my day, but I should have been a very indifferent shopkeeper, because I never could bring myself to care for that lost centime—though I have lost many!'

He rose with a laugh, remembering the grand gaspillage of his generous and careless manhood. It had not been wise, perhaps, but it had been delightful; and, after all, he had as much as he wanted now in his little river-side house, his good wall fruits, and his first editions of MoliÈre and of Marivaux. He would not have been a whit happier had he been a millionaire.

As the frank mellow sound of his laughter echoed on the air, and the shadow of the doves' tower lengthened behind them on the grass, the notes of a horn in the fanfare which is called La BrisÉe, blew loud and full over the fields to their ears.

'What is that?' cried Damaris, startled at the sound which she had never heard before.

'I forgot; it is the first day for hunting,' said Rosselin, listening. 'It is the ouverture de la chasse.'

As he spoke some equestrians rode out from a thicket across the field in which they were. They were members of the hunt of Dampierre, clad in a picturesque costume and looking like a picture of the time of Louis Quinze as the warm sunset light fell across them. They rode on quickly towards the west whence came the notes of the hunting fanfare.

They did not look towards herself or Rosselin; but a few seconds later another huntsman, whose hunter was lame, came by in their wake more slowly, leading his horse. He turned his head, paused a moment or two, then rode straight towards them.

It was the Duc de BÉthune. He doffed his tricornered gold-laced hat and bade Rosselin, whom he knew well, good-evening; then glanced at Damaris.

'Mademoiselle BÉrarde!' he said, hesitatingly. 'Surely I do not mistake?'

She looked at him with recognition.

'You came to the island with her,' she said, rather to herself than to him. The colour grew hot in her face; all the unforgettable shame of that day was with her in bitter recollection.

'I am honoured by so much remembrance, and grateful to the hole in the turf which lamed my horse.'

'That is language for the chÂteau of Dampierre,' said Rosselin. 'M. le Duc has lost his way, I think?'

'No; I know my road,' said BÉthune, who understood the old man's meaning. 'And I never speak any language, Rosselin, but that which best conveys my real thoughts. You, who are so perfect an artist in speech, must be aware that I am a very clumsy one. Is there any smith here who could look to my poor beast?'

'You can put him up at the house where I live,' said Damaris. 'It is a very little way off; we can show you.'

'That will be sweetest charity,' said BÉthune.

Rosselin did not see his way to prevent what annoyed him. The Duke, with the bridle over his arm, walked beside her over the pasture; the notes of the BrisÉe had ceased; the hunt had passed onward westward, where Dampierre was.

BÉthune spoke to her with deference and interest, but she answered him briefly and absently. Rosselin kept up the conversation. Suddenly she said in a low tone:

'You have seen her—lately?'

BÉthune was surprised.

'You mean the Countess Othmar, your hostess of St. Pharamond? Yes; I saw her a week ago. We stayed together at the same country house in Austria, and I shall soon see her again at AmyÔt. That is her castle, as I dare say you know, on the Loire.'

Damaris said nothing. She paced onward, a little in advance of him and of Rosselin; her head was drooped, her face was thoughtful.

'She was not as kind to you in appearance that day as, I assure you, that she was in feeling,' said BÉthune, not knowing well what to say. 'She is capricious and negligent, but she has a mind that is very generous and true in its instincts, and those instincts were all your friends and admirers.'

Damaris remained silent.

'The chief instinct of the lady you speak of is to provide herself with amusement,' said Rosselin curtly. 'She usually fails, because the world is so small.'

'You are unjust to her,' said BÉthune, her loyal servant and courtier. 'I am sure that she felt the truest interest in Mademoiselle BÉrarde. We were all of us distressed when we learned that that magic isle was tenantless.'

'The new Virginie has left her isle,' said Rosselin, 'and I am endeavouring that she shall not make shipwreck on these stonily seas of art and life. My dear duke, great ladies like your chÂtelaine of AmyÔt let fall idle words, never thinking what they may bring forth. It is so easy to destroy content and to suggest ambition. But to efface a suggestion is very hard when once it has taken root in a young mind.'

BÉthune guessed at his meaning. 'The world will be the gainer,' he said, as they entered the courtyard of the Croix Blanche.

Damaris called a man to his horse, then, without even looking at him, she crossed the court and went indoors, and he saw her no more.

'She is very much changed,' said BÉthune in surprise as he looked at the dusky archway of the door through whose shadows she had passed from his sight. 'What is her story since I saw her on that happy island; I shall never forget it; its blue sea, its radiant air, its scent of orange-flowers, its handsome child reciting to us from Esther—it was a poem. Are you going to make a great artist of her? Tell me her story since that day I saw her on her isle.'

'I do not know it,' said Rosselin. 'All I have to do with is the Muse in her. My dear Duke, I repeat, your gracious Lady of AmyÔt, for her own diversion, poured into a childish breast a little drop of that divine curiosity which men call ambition: it was only a drop but it burned its way into the soul, and will eat up the life before it has done, I dare say. Madame NadÈge did not care what mischief she did: oh no: she only wanted to while away an empty hour for herself.'

BÉthune reddened indignant for his absent sovereign.

'As you are so great an artist yourself you should think that she did well in waking any soul to art.'

'No,' said Rosselin angrily. 'No one does well who meddles with fate or displaces peaceful ignorance and honest content by unrest and desire. This child was happy on her island. The world may perchance make her famous some day, but happy it will never make her again, for happiness is not amongst its gifts!'

'That is quite true,' said BÉthune with a sigh. He asked many more questions, but obtained little information. He waited in vain for Damaris to re-appear. The sun sank, the shadows deepened into dusk over all the vale, the swallows circled in their last flight round the high house roofs. With reluctance he was forced to bid adieu to Rosselin and take his way to the distant chÂteau of Dampierre, where he was a guest.

'Salute her for me,' he said at parting. 'Say that I shall return to thank her to-morrow.'

'If you wish to do her any service in return for the help to your horse, do not speak of her at Dampierre or in Paris,' said Rosselin.

'I will not speak of her to anyone,' returned BÉthune, 'unless it be to the Countess Othmar. But you will allow me to return.'

'I have no power to forbid you. Yet it is to her that perhaps it would be desirable you should say nothing,' answered Rosselin after a moment of hesitation. 'I merely mean that the Lady of AmyÔt did, I believe, prophesy a great career for my pupil, and first of all suggest to her the possible possession of talents the world might recognise. For that reason I think Damaris BÉrarde would prefer that she should hear nothing more of her, unless some day the world itself may have justified her predictions.'

'You think it probable, or you would not waste your hours on her?'

'I think she has infinite feeling and a poetic temperament. Whether these are enough remains to be seen. There are so many other qualities required, all those humbler qualities which are the prose of genius, the plain bread of character.'

'She has one requisite, beauty. She is exceedingly handsome. What brought her here?'

'I cannot say: I am only her teacher.'

'And who is her lover?' mused BÉthune, as he walked slowly out of the grey courtyard in the gloaming. His suspicions drifted to Loswa.

Rosselin went within and mounted a low wooden staircase which led to the door of Damaris's chamber.

'Come out and bid me good-night, my dear. If I loiter I shall lose the last train to Paris.'

She obeyed him and came outside her door.

'Why did you avoid BÉthune?' he asked her. 'He is a gentleman and a soldier; he is a man you may respect and who will respect you; though he is a great noble he is an honest fellow. He is one of the few lovers who have worshipped Othmar's wife without losing dignity or honour.'

Damaris did not answer. She could not well have defined why she had come within doors. There was a certain pain to her in the presence of BÉthune because he was associated with that one day so big, for her, with fate.

Rosselin looked at her as she stood in the twilight at the head of the stairs. There was an open window behind her, a hand's breadth of blue sky, a bough of pear heavy with fruit.

'Why did you not mention Othmar to him?' he said abruptly; 'you mentioned her.'

'I do not know.' said Damaris. She spoke the truth. She did not know why she was always reluctant to speak of him.

'Good-night, my child,' said Rosselin, with a tenderness in his voice that was new to her ear. He sighed as he too went on his way through the dusky dewy fields, sweet with the breath of browsing cattle and murmurous with the whispers of the leaves.