During these later weeks, which were filled for him with dull and distasteful cares, Damaris was recovering more fully and more rapidly health and strength than she had done at first in the atmosphere of luxury and service by which she was surrounded; it was the first illness that she had ever known, and she could not understand her own weakness, the languor which lay so heavily on her, the sense of dreaming instead of living which the lassitude and beatitude of convalescence brought to her.
She had grown; she had lost all the warm sea bloom upon her face and arms; she was very thin, and her eyes looked too large for her other features: but she was nearly well again, and only a little pain in her breathing, a sense of feebleness in her limbs, remained from the dangerous malady which had threatened to cut her life short in its earliest blossom. When she could think coherently, and understand clearly, her shame at the beggar's position to which she had sunk was shared and outweighed by her passionate gratitude to her deliverer. The figure of Othmar was always before her eyes, god-like, angel-like, stooping to deliver her from the mire and horror of the streets of Paris.
'Could I see him?' she said at last to her attendants; the question had been upon her lips many days, but she had not had courage to put it into words. They promised her to tell him that she wished it, and they did so.
'I will see her, certainly, in the forenoon to-morrow,' said Othmar, moved by the request to a sudden sense of the strangeness and responsibility of his own position towards her. What would Nadège see in it? Something supremely ridiculous, no doubt. Something of the 'lac et nacelle' school worthy of the romanticists of the year '30?
As yet he had not even informed her of the bare fact that this child of the island was in his house in Paris.
He looked often at the portrait by Loswa of the child with the red fishing-cap on her auburn curls, and he always heard the mocking of his wife's voice saying with her careless amused raillery: 'Si vous en devenez amoureux?'
And each time that he was about to tell her as he wrote to her that the girl for whom she had predicted the destiny of Aimée Desclée was lying mortally sick and apparently wholly friendless beneath his roof, the recollection of that raillery made him unwilling to provoke it anew. She might share his compassion and appreciate his motives: it was possible that she might do so if—if!——the narrative reached her in one of what she called her bons moments. He knew that there were emotions both of generosity and of pity in her nature, but he knew also that they were fitful and uncertain in their action. He had never known her stirred twice to interest in the same object; her caprices were, as she had said, like a convolvulus flower, and only blossomed for a day; when a thing or a person had ceased to interest her, sooner could a mummy have been awaked to consciousness under its swathings of linen than her attention be recalled and attracted to it any more.
'Quand l'amour est mort, il est bien mort,' says a cruel truism; and as it is with love so was it with her fancies and enthusiasms. Once dead and forgotten there was no resurrection for them.
He knew that with her everything depended on her mood. A great tragedy or a great heroism would seem to her admirable or absurd, precisely according to the humour of the hour; a pathetic history or a terrible calamity would find her disposed either to turn it into ridicule, or receive it with sympathy, merely as her day had been agreeable or tiresome, as her companions had interested or wearied her, as her toilette had pleased or displeased her.
'My dear Otho,' she had said once to him, when he had ventured on some courteously-worded reproof of this extreme uncertainty of her temperament, 'if I did not get a little variety out of my own sensations, I should never find any at all anywhere. I cannot be like the editor of a newspaper, who, whatever may happen, always has his joy or his woe already in stereotype and large capitals. If one gets up in the morning to find a grey sky when one wants a blue one, to find a dull post-bag instead of an amusing one, to be disappointed in the effect of a costume, to be prevented from riding by getting a chill, what can one care if all Europe were in flames? Whereas, if everything is pleasant when one wakes, one remains quite amiable enough all the morning to be sorry even for Gavroche and Cossette in the street! Caprice? No, it is not precisely caprice. It is rather something in one's temperament which is acted on by one's surroundings, as the barometer is by the weather. If I have ever done any very generous or great things, as you are flattering enough to tell me that I have, it must have been at some exceptional moment when Worth had especially pleased me. All the finer inspirations of women come from satisfaction with themselves or their gowns!'