Othmar was silent from emotion. It seemed unutterably cruel to him that this child should have been led into such perils, such pain, such want, by one careless word of his wife's, and he, who all his life long had had about him everything that luxury can invent and comfort demand shuddered at the thought of her suffering and her exposure, as though he had seen his own little daughter naked and shivering in the snows and the winds of a winter's night.
When he left her presence that day he could think of nothing but her piteous story. The heroic courage of the young girl, the noble qualities she had all unconsciously revealed in the course of its narration, the utter friendlessness of her position, and the fearless frankness of her confidence in himself, all touched his heart closely. It seemed horrible to him that any woman-child should suffer so much and be surrounded with such cruel perils. Those days in Paris had done the work of years upon this innocent creature, who had before only known the freshness of sea and shore, the safety of a sheltered youth, the dauntless gaiety of a buoyant and unchecked spirit; but he saw that all through it, through all its miseries and all its temptations, she had kept her soul unhurt. He dared not ask her how she had done so, but he knew that she had defended herself safely from all foul contact, and again it seemed to him a miracle great as that which guides the swallow over desert and ocean back to its last year's nest.
CHAPTER XXV.
Othmar was naturally of a tender and even enthusiastic nature. His sympathies were warm and spontaneous, his imagination was strong and governed his reason very often. There was much in the circumstances of this poor child which appealed both to tenderness and imagination, and he was haunted by her swift mellow voice, with its meridional intonations, her great dark luminous eyes filling with sudden tears as she remembered her island home.
He felt that they owed her a debt. They had robbed her of her birthright of simple joys and honest, obscure, healthful ways of life. They could never again make her what they had found her. Who can put back the gathered rosebud on the rose-bough?
They had a right to give her what they could give in lieu of all which she had lost, indirectly but indisputably, through their means. His conscience, as well as his common sense, told him that as his wife had been the chief offender against the child's peace, so she had the first right to know the results of her interference, and amend them. But he had the moral timidity of proud, reticent, and sensitive natures: he dreaded her irony and her indifference. He could not tell what she would say or do; possibly in the end something which he would approve; but he knew that first of all she would ridicule him: with her lips certainly, very likely even in her thoughts. Even when he had been her lover she had always laughed at him for taking life so seriously, for being Ruy Blas and Rolla rather than Sir Harry Wildair. And even if she were moved to any kindness, how likely would her languid, haughty footsteps tread hurtfully, without knowing or heeding it, on the storm-tossed wild flower? She could be exquisitely kind, magnificently generous; none more so: but was it not, alas! only while her mood to be so lasted?
'I will tell her—later,' he said, with that temporising before difficulty which many a man, bold and even rash in his dealings with his fellow-men, is apt to adopt when he deals with women.
Meanwhile, something had to be done at once, he knew, to reconcile Damaris to her dependence upon himself. He knew she was of the temper which would break loose from the safest shelter and rush to the direst danger if she deemed herself humiliated by assistance. In all her grace of youth and helplessness of circumstance, there was still something warm, strong, untameable in her, which he felt as the hand which holds a bird will feel its wings stir and tremble ready to fly. It would, he knew, be hard to aid her. It would have to be done in her own despite.
A thought occurred to him; one of those spontaneous ideas which come to us like very angels, and which, in after years, seem rather born of hell than heaven. On it he spoke to her the next day.