The days slipped one after another away, and he had still said nothing to her of Damaris. He seldom saw her alone; when he did so, no opening had presented itself which seemed to him propitious. The length of time which he had unwisely allowed to elapse now created an additional difficulty. She might, if he told her now, naturally ask why he had been silent so long. He had made no intentional concealment; anyone of the household knew that the girl had been there in the summer and throughout her illness. But no one, not even her most confidential attendants, would ever have ventured to tell their mistress anything unasked. She held them at a distance, which the boldest of them never dared to pass. The only servant she had treated with more familiarity had been the little African boy Mahmoud; and Mahmoud had died, in his fifteenth year, from the cruel north winds of Northern Europe, babbling in his delirium to the last, in Arabic, words of his lady and his love for her, poor little tropical beast! killed as men kill the antelope kid of the desert when they drag it from its groves of palm and its warm golden sands, to shiver and perish behind the bars of a cage in a northern menagerie.

Not one of the household spoke, or would ever speak, of anything which ever took place unknown to their mistress; but they knew, doubtless—as servants in great cities know all the affairs of their employers—that the young girl who had been ill there, brought in from the streets in the bygone summer, was dwelling at Les Hameaux, and was occasionally visited by their master. Partly from their gossiping when outside his walls, and partly from other causes, the name of Damaris BÉrarde began to be bruited about in Paris. A secret is very like a subtle odour; it escapes by unseen crevices and passes to the outer air, though every egress may be barred. A certain vague rumour arose that not only had Rosselin discovered some new and great talent which he was training for the public stage, but that with this hidden life which was so carefully concealed the name of Othmar was connected.

Had Blanche de Laon been accused of first setting afloat that breath of calumny, she would have declared, and truthfully, 'Moi? Je n'ai jamais soufflÉ mot!'

Yet she had conveyed a hint into the air, and it was sufficient. One thistle-seed is enough to choke a field with thistles.

In vain do we think we walk in private paths unseen; some eyes are forever there to peer through the thickest hedge; some lips are forever ready to say what they do not know, and magnify the harmless mouse-ear to a wonder-flower with a poisoned root. Those of whom rumour thus discourses with bated breath and comprehensive gesture are seldom or never aware that they are the subject of such whispers; they are always the last to imagine that their acts are put under the magnifying-lenses of public speculation.

Even Rosselin, with his intimate knowledge of the inquisitiveness and the loquacity of human nature, did not dream that the mere fact of his going twice or thrice a week to Les Hameaux and taking a neophyte to the temples of his own art, to quiet morning recitations, could be a fact of any import to the world at large. He had had so many pupils, and he never remembered that the world had had any concern with them unless they had become ultimately great enough to challenge and compel its languid attention; and even then its notice had been very hard to obtain, Why should it break its rule of universal apathy and indifference towards those who are obscure because a young girl lived on a farm in the pastoral solitudes which had once sheltered Racine?

Both he and Othmar, in very different ways, had a reserve and hauteur of manner which always kept at arm's length rash intruders and trivial questioners. Therefore they were the last persons on earth to hear anything of what rumour murmured of either of them. Damaris, in her simple home under the ashes and elms of the Croix Blanche, was not more isolated from the gossip of the world than they both were by choice and temperament. But the world gossiped not the less but the more for the immunity which their ignorance permitted to it, and because it knew little invented much.

The world to whom Othmar's was so familiar and conspicuous a name built for him a tall edifice of lies down in those innocent pastures of Les Hameaux. But he was unconscious of that house of fable in which they made him dwell. He believed that his own abstention from any visits there made Damaris as safe from notice as though she were still beneath the orange leaves and olive shadows of her isle. If she wanted anything or any counsel, Rosselin would tell him he felt sure. At times the memory of her, as he had left her standing in the evening dusk amongst the red-brown seeding grasses, made him desire to see her with a wish he restrained. Sometimes the recollection of her flushed, bowed face, as he had touched her forehead with his lips, came over him with an emotion which was too gentle for desire, too kind for passion; but he resisted it.

'To see me can do her no good' he said to himself; 'and it may make others do her harm. If she be left alone she may learn to live for art: it is a safe and kindly friend.'

One day, when he was at work in his little cabinet du travail, his wife came to him there for a moment on her way to her carriage. It was his favourite room; it opened on one side into the library, on the other into the gardens; the peacocks would walk in from without when the doors stood open, and the green gloom of an avenue of coniferÆ stretched away immediately in front of its steps. It was here that the sketch made by Loswa hung betwixt a woodland glade painted by Corot, and a sloop becalmed in the Sound painted by Aivanoffsky.

It was rarely that Nadine deigned to enter there; she paused there now for a moment with an open note in her hand, which she had received that instant from Prince Hohenlohe, requesting her intercession with Othmar concerning some matter of German interest which did not brook delay.

It was soon disposed of. He wrote a line and gave it to her to do as she pleased with it, and looked at her with wistfulness. It was the first time he had seen her that day; it was four o'clock, she was about to attend a musical gathering at the Prince of Lemberg's hotel in the Boulevard JosÉphine, convened to hear the first execution by illustrious amateurs of a pastoral cantata of his own composition on the theme of Ruth.

'You are going to the Ruth?' asked Othmar.

'Yes; I wonder you are not. Music used always to draw you out of your hole like a lizard.'

'I have a great deal to do,' he replied; 'and, besides, how many times have you not enforced on me the bourgeois absurdity of accompanying you anywhere?'

'You need not accompany me. You can come by yourself. Certainly I think it does look absurd to see two people always together like two dogs in a coupling-chain.'

Othmar sighed a little impatiently.

'Lemberg has chosen a very bourgeois theme; surely very archaic and ill adapted for his audience. The emotions of Ruth will seem to your world something as ridiculous as a gown of the time of Marie AmÉlie!'

'They are only in a pastoral,' she said with a smile. 'They are very well there. We are not required to share them. You would share them, perhaps; nobody else would.'

'You mean I should share those of Boaz!'

'Boaz or any other vrai berger. You should inhabit one of the happy valleys of Florian and Mademoiselle ScudÉry. There is always something in your ideas which is quite of the last century, and seems to suggest a flock of sheep with ribbons and a crook, like those in the Saxes statuettes. If I were to die, you would like to lie on a bank of violets and mourn me in alexandrines.'

He smiled, but the raillery was not welcome to him. It seemed to him that, if she had any love for him, she would never laugh at him, never see in him that weaker, absurder side, which may be found in every human character if eyes without sympathy look for it. And the imputation of sentimentality irritated him as it irritates all those whose feelings are strong and whose temperament is incapable of any affectation or of any shallowness.

Let a man have as little vanity as he may, yet in his secret heart he likes the woman he loves to find him a little more than man. He had been long conscious that he would for ever look in vain for this kind of admiration from her. There was a certain depreciation even in her indulgence; there was an invariable criticism in her mental attitude, however favourable; she could be no more deceived as to the weaknesses of character than a great surgeon can be as to the weaknesses of body. True, her wit and her intellect served to retain her power over him, but then he was nervously sensible that these made him less in her eyes than he would willingly have been. He was aware that the very fineness of her penetration, the very brilliancy of her mind, made her infinitely more hard to please for any length of time than women of smaller brain and of less highly-trained powers. To a woman of rare intellect and of critical wit it is difficult for any man to remain long a hero.

'Our minds are all finite, alas! and you want the infinite,' he said once to her with some petulance, conscious that his own mind did not content hers any more than any other man's.

She assented.

'I have no doubt it was always the same everywhere,' she conceded. 'Probably Marcus Aurelius was very dull and fussy if one knew the truth; and I dare say even Horace is livelier on paper than he was in person!'

As she spoke now, her eyes had wandered at the paintings which were hung on the wall behind him. He saw that they rested on Loswa's sketch. He took the occasion which seemed to present itself.

'Have you ever thought of her?' he asked, turning to look himself at the portrait.

'Thought of whom? I was thinking that Loswa has lost something of his originality, of his singularity: what he has produced this year is all banal.'

'Or seems so. That is always the Nemesis which overtakes a mere trick of manner; when once it ceases to startle it becomes commonplace. That sketch is so admirable because it is no trick: it was a genuine inspiration of the moment. Loswa was never so natural before or since.'

He spoke indifferently, but he was looking at her with concealed anxiety. Perchance it was a propitious hour in which to tell her of the fate of Damaris.

'Do you ever think of that child?' he said abruptly.

'Of what child?' she asked.

'Of the one for whom you predicted the future of DesclÉe?' he answered with a movement of his hand towards the picture.

She looked at the portrait with an effort at recollection. She had really forgotten the whole matter; it had been such a trivial incident to her, though so momentous to the other actor in it. He saw that her forgetfulness was quite unfeigned. She went up to the sketch and looked closely at it, drawing on one of her long gloves as she did so.

'Ah, yes; I remember now. A little fisher-girl who interested you, and whom you took home one night over the sea in a most romantic fashion. What of her? Has she married her shipwright? Was it a shipwright? Do you want me to give her some nuptial present, or a baptismal cup? All the idyls end in one's having to buy something ugly at a silversmith's!'

'I told you once before she did not marry the boat-builder—the shipwright, as you call him. You made it impossible for her to do so.'

'I did?' she repeated with amusement. 'You mean Loswa did; or you, perhaps——'

He grew red with anger.

'I do not like such jests.'

'Oh, my dear, you like no jests! You are a knight of doleful countenance and take everything au pied de la lettre. If you had had a little amourette with a fisher-girl it would argue bad taste perhaps, but it would not surprise me, except as a fault in taste.'

'Nor would it matter to you,' he said bitterly; 'you have given me my liberty so very often that, with the usual obstinate ingratitude of human nature, I could have wished you less kind—and less indifferent.'

'All the same, are you sure you have never taken advantage of my kindness?' she said with amusement. 'If not, you must be the ideal husband of that bourgeois par excellence, Dumas fils. But it is a quarter-past four. Au revoir.'

He opened the door for her in silence, and in silence escorted her through the house to her carriage, and bowed low as it rolled away.

His heart was bitter against her. He had been at once disappointed and relieved at the failure of his effort. Damaris was not even a recollection to her; she had caused the uprooting of the child's whole life, but she thought no more about it than a person strolling through green fields thinks of some field flower which he has plucked up, carried a moment in listless fingers, then flung away. Her own life was humbly touched by so many supplicants whom she passed, not seeing them, so many whose eyes were fastened on her in envy and in wonder, that a poor little barbarian who had been under her roof one brief evening could occupy no cell of her memory. If he told her the whole story she would only laugh; call him probably Scipio or Galahad. She would be sure to say something which would wound him; she would be sure to receive his narrative with a cruel smile of doubt if not of derision.

'Time will tell her as much as she will ever care to know,' he thought with the procrastination natural to a hesitating temper. Time would tell her, if ever her forgotten DesclÉe should become one of those on whom the fierce light of the world's fame beat; whilst if the life of Damaris should pass away in failure, in obscurity, in the paths of privacy, what would it ever be to her? No more than the rain which fell, or the dust which blew, in some dreary by-street which her own graceful steps never approached. She had no pity for failure, no sympathy with impotence; the unsuccessful were to her eyes the born crÉtins of the world.

He paused on the terrace of the house as her carriage rolled on its noiseless tires through the courtyard and out of the great gilded gates.

His heart was heavy, and a personal offence was in him against her as he remembered her words.

What plainer hint could she have given him to pass his time and take his caresses elsewhere?

All alone though he was, his cheek grew red with anger and mortification.

'What does it matter to her what I do?' he thought bitterly, with a sense of mortification. 'I must be the vainest fool if I can flatter myself that, had I a hundred mistresses she would be ever jealous of any one of them. Men are feeble creatures, and coarse, and what they do matters nothing to her. So long as I do not cross her threshold unbidden, or ruffle a rose-leaf beneath her, what does she care what I do?'

As she herself passed behind her black Ukraine horses through the streets, a certain vague annoyance came over her, remembering his manner and his words.

He had never before been irritable as he was now. The evenness of his temper had been perfect, and had allowed her so great a latitude in the indulgence of her satire upon him, that she had been led to think him weaker than he was. It was only of late that he had answered her with a touch of bitterness, had hinted his impatience of her criticisms, and had shown that fatigue before their manner of life which he did not now affect to conceal.

'If we go on like this,' she thought, 'we shall become like everybody else; we shall not subside into friendship, but only into dissension, and the world will end in observing our dissensions, which will annoy me, his whole temper is so utterly unphilosophic. He cannot understand and accept the inevitable. He would have liked me to go and live in the centre of Asia Minor and adore him: I refused to do it when it would have been interesting to do. Good heavens! Why should I do it now, when I know every line of his face and every turn of his character as one knows the very stones on a road one takes daily?'

She had been wearied by his romantic ideas and by his unpractical aspirations, which suggested to her only more ennui than the world, stupid as it was, afforded her already. Yet she was irritated by her own latent consciousness that she should not care to know that his dreams went elsewhere.

'Comme cette fille lui trotte dans la tÊte!' she said, half aloud, with surprise and irritation. Her knowledge of men told her that remembrance with them usually means attraction, that irritation usually means some secret consciousness, some unspoken interest.

Languidly she recalled from the depths of her own memory the trivial, long-forgotten incident of Damaris BÉrarde, whose features the sketch by Loswa had preserved from oblivion. She remembered how absurdly chivalrous Othmar had been that evening, how coldly and sharply he had rebuked herself for her negligence towards the child.

Pshaw! how like a man it would be, she thought; if he had been attracted by a little peasant with brown hands and bare feet!

If, after all, he were just like other men, she thought; if he had a villa on the Seine, a cottage at Meudon, where he passed his time when he was supposed to be closeted with the Rothschild, or gone to a conference with Bleichroeder? Would she care much? She thought not. She would feel that half good-natured disdain which a woman, passionless herself, always feels for the riotous passions of men; but she did not think that it would affect her peace of mind in any way.

If it were a woman in her own world, yes; she would have resented that. She would have felt it an offence and an outrage. She would have disliked the comments of her own world on it; she would have been impatient of the ridicule or the compassion which it might have entailed on herself from others; and she would have been angered at the possible ascendency over his intellect, and the possession of his confidence, which such a rival would perchance have acquired to her own despite.

But of what she would have called a mere vulgar liaison she would have felt no jealousy, not even much surprise, for she considered that men were slaves of their appetites, even when they were masters of their intelligence.

For the whole ways of life of a man she had that contempt which a woman who reads their hearts and knows their follies is apt lo entertain when to herself the senses say little, and their gratification is indifferent. But if it were a question of the possession of his mind and thoughts by a new passion, if anyone had passed before her and taken that pre-eminence in his imagination which she had held so long, she became irritably conscious that this would be unwelcome to her. A love which reigned over his fancy, occupied his memory in absence, and had empire over his will, would be an assumption of her own place, would be a seizure of all that more spiritual and subtle dominion which had been peculiarly her own.

She had had unbounded influence over him for ten years; she had been so certain of her influence that she had been for once absurdly credulous of its duration. Though she knew that passions wane like moons, yet she had never doubted in her soul (whatever scepticism her lips might have declared in jest) that his for her would never become less. She had never truly realised that the time would come when her surpassing seductions might leave him cold as one who hears a twice-told tale, when his immortal passion for her might lie dead like last year's leaves.

She had always piqued herself upon the wisdom with which she had looked at all accidents and sentiments of life. She had always believed that no weakness or instability of human nature could ever take her by surprise. And yet to find that at last she had lost her sorcery for his senses and her exclusive reign over his thoughts astonished her with a shock of humiliated surprise.

During the pause between the two parts into which 'Ruth' was divided, the guests of the Prince of Lemberg left the music-room and strayed at their will through the other apartments of his beautiful little house, which was modestly called a pavilion, and stood withdrawn behind gardens and high walls of clipped evergreens. It was four o'clock in the winter's day, and the whole of the rooms were lighted as at night; the hundred or so of people who were there represented all that was greatest in fashion, with a few of those who were greatest in art. Belonging, as he deemed, to both categories, Loris Loswa was amongst those present.

'Bring me some tea,' she said to him when she had seated herself in a little alcove filled with bananas and palms, whose green branches drooped against a background of Florentine tapestries, and threw up in high relief the dead gold and dusky furs of her costume. When he brought it she signed to him to seat himself on a stool at her feet. He obeyed, flattered and charmed.

'Loris,' she said in a low tone to him, 'what became of the subject of that sketch you made two years ago on that island in the seas beyond Monaco?'

Loswa reflected a moment, then he answered with perfect candour:

'I have never thought of her from that day to this. I meant to have made a great picture from that little study, but I lost sight of it; I sold it.'

'You sold it to us: yes. It is there in Otho's room. I have often wondered what became of the original. Do you mean that you have never had the curiosity to inquire?'

'I really never have. She was certainly a provincial beauty, but they are not the beauties which dwell longest in my mind. I intended to make something trÈs empoignant of that sketch, but I forgot it, once it was sold.'

'How like a modern painter!' she said with amusement, and changed the subject.

Lemberg approached and Loswa rose.

'What is your verdict on my work?' asked the composer of 'Ruth.' 'I am very nervous till you have spoken. When they are all praising me and you are mute, I think of those lines of Robert Browning's, which tell us how the musician heard all the theatre applaud, but himself looked only to the place where "Rossini sat silent in his stall."'

'If I were silent in my stall,' she replied, 'it must have been because silence seemed the fittest tribute to your exquisite pastoral. One seemed to hear the corn bend, the wind sigh, the poppies blow. For one half hour you made me in love with the country! And then the farewell to Naomi——I only wish that Gluck were alive to hear.'

She passed on to a discriminating criticism of the musical structure of the composition, with all that profound and scientific knowledge of the tonic art which were united in her to the most subtle appreciation of its phases. The 'Ruth' had charmed her ear, and her mind could distinguish why it did so.

BÉthune, who was near, had heard the conversation, and wondered if Loswa were speaking falsely. He thought not; he felt an impulse to speak of what he had seen at Les Hameaux on the day his horse was lamed, but he refrained. Rosselin had invited his silence, and Rosselin was not a man of idle words, nor likely to give a caution without some good motive.

Yet he felt a sense of guilt and of complicity. He had gone back twice or thrice out of a sense of courtesy, as well as of interest, and he had learned easily, from the people of the hamlet, how and through whom she had been brought thither. The knowledge that it was Othmar who had placed her there had struck him first with amazement, then with anger.

He knew none of the circumstances which had brought Damaris BÉrarde to Paris. She preserved an obstinate silence in regard to herself, and his good breeding would not allow him to put direct questions to her which were evidently unwelcome ones. It was only in the village that he heard the name of Othmar, and the chivalrous laws which governed his actions at all times did not allow him to try and learn what was withheld from him. The hostility to Othmar which had for so many years been so powerful a factor in his life was the strongest of all reasons with him to compel him to abstain from all investigation, to avoid the least semblance of inquisitiveness as to his conduct. But in the absence of knowledge he placed the natural construction of a man of the world on the little he knew, and the facts of her altered abode and manner of life, and he was angered against the man who could, as he thought, change for new amours the passion which he had given to his wife.

Of the faults of that temperament which left Othmar's unsatisfied and repelled, BÉthune was too loyal a lover to see anything. Her very defects had always seemed beauties in his eyes. To desert such a woman as she was for even so lovely a child as Damaris seemed to him intolerably unworthy; and the secret conduct of such a connection seemed to him at once commonplace and coarse. He had always done justice to the rarity and delicacy of many qualities in his successful rival, and the discovery of what he supposed to be a mere intrigue in his daily life surprised and disgusted him. When he heard NadÈge now speak of Damaris BÉrarde he felt indignantly grieved for her deception, as men are always inclined to grieve for a woman who interests them before an infidelity which is not their own.

'Who would have believed that even she would fail to secure constancy?' he thought as he watched the light play upon the rings upon her hand as she gave back her cup to Loswa.

'You look interested in my inquiries,' said Nadine, observing his countenance with amusement. 'Is it possible that you followed up that idyl on an island of which I let you read the first chapter?'

'No, indeed,' said BÉthune in haste, with a certain embarrassment which did not escape her observation.

'My dear friend, it would not be a crime if you did,' she said with a smile. 'Considering how many men saw that handsome child in my rooms, I know very little of human nature if some one at least of them did not return to the isle to write an epilogue to 'Esther.' Loris denies that he has done so. To be sure, men always deny that sort of accusation. But for once he looks innocent.'

'You never heard anything of her?' asked BÉthune, conscious that he did not speak wholly at his ease.

'What should one hear? I dare say she has shut up her play-books and eaten her bridal bonbons by this. I remember she was quite stupid when one saw her close; she kept blinking in the light of my dancing-rooms like a little owl out at noonday. If she had had any real talent mere upholstery would not have had any power to strike her dumb.'

'Probably it was not the upholstery. You have struck dumb greater persons than she.'

'When I have desired to do so. But with her I do not remember that I desired it. I desired only to be kind to her. I have always wished to discover genius in some obscure creature.'

'They say Rosselin has discovered one,' said Paul of Lemberg. 'Then you will say, it is his trade.'

'Who is it?'

'Ah, that I know not. Some woman or child who is to revive all the last glories of the French stage. Some one kept in perfect obscurity hitherto, as bird-trainers keep their piping bullfinches in the dark all day long.'

He spoke with no second thought, knowing nothing more than that which he said. But BÉthune, silently listening, felt again an uneasy sense as of some guilty complicity in what he withheld from the person whom it most nearly concerned.

Yet it was not for him to give up to her what Othmar had concealed from her. Unwillingly and perforce, his honour and his delicacy made him the reluctant keeper of a secret which he disapproved. 'I have always been his enemy, so I must be now his friend,' he thought with that loyalty which was the strength of his character, though a quality so little known to his generation that it seemed to it to be a weakness.

'Am I an imbecile,' she thought as she drove away from the house, 'am I an imbecile, that this girl I had utterly forgotten haunts me all day long like a phrase of the 'Ruth?' Is it just because I looked at her picture? Or is it because that song of Paul's, "O, reine des champs," made me remember her as I saw her going through the hepaticas under the orange leaves on her strange little island? All these men know something of her, I think, and Otho perhaps knows most.'

As she drove through the streets, lying almost at full length in her carriage, wrapped in furs and with a great bouquet of gardenia idly clasped in her hands, her eyes were closed, but her thoughts were awake. A little contemptuous smile was on her lips, but a great slowly-arousing and amazed suspicion was in her heart.

She had bidden him take his liberty, true. So great sovereigns bid their courtiers take theirs; but evil betides the courtier who is rash enough to construe the bidding literally.