'That may be,' he said; 'but it is a caprice of mine. If the island ever comes into the market, obtain it for me on any terms. The owner may need money some day, or may change his mind.'
His experience of men was that they always sold things in the long run, if they could do so with advantage, and that they seldom remained in the same mind when it turned to their profit to change it.
CHAPTER XXVI.
When he returned from the south he paused at Amyôt before going on to Paris. He wanted a day or two to reflect on the future of Damaris before he saw her again. It was a problem which did not very easily admit of solution, without oppressing her with a sense of debt and servitude.
The certainty that her cousin would do nothing to help her brought home to himself the gravity of his position towards her. He had taken her from the streets as a kind man will take a stray dog; he had as much actual right to turn her out to them again as the man would have to turn out the dog, but his compassion and his chivalry forbade him to think of such desertion of her. There was that in the loneliness of her circumstances which touched all the warmest and most pitiful fibres of his nature, whilst the fact that more or less directly the caprice of his wife had been the beginning of all her misfortunes, made him feel that he owed a duty and a debt to her which could only be discharged by the most honest and sedulous endeavour to do well by her and secure her future from shipwreck.
But what was that future to be? To seek any counsel from his wife seemed to him useless. He had seen her more than once moved to strong interest and expectation by some nascent talent which she had fostered and sheltered in the sunshine of her favour, in the hothouse of her world; and he had also seen her intolerant impatience and her profound oblivion when her anticipations had been unrealised, and that which she had honoured had proved incapable of rising to the heights of great achievement. He knew the changes of her temperament too well to be willing to subject to their fluctuations a proud and sensitive child. Even if she deigned to notice her again, Damaris could never be more to her than a mere plaything, and she had a terrible habit of tiring of her toys in ten minutes. She had had a fanciful idea that the girl had talents of a high order, and he knew that if her fancy proved at fault she would become intolerant of the person who had disappointed her expectations. Mediocrity had always seemed to her the worst of all offences. The flowers which might unclose at sunrise might never reach, or never bear if they did reach, the glare of noon. The world is pitiless, that he knew, and to its wedding feast of fame many crowd, but few are chosen. And Nadège, he knew too, would be as intolerant as the world if where she had deigned to believe that genius existed, she should only find a mere facile and fragile talent, without power to ascend where she bade it soar, or force to justify her protection of it.
He had not, either, forgotten her suggestion before Loswa's sketch, that some day he would fall in love with the subject of it. The jest had annoyed him and offended him.
Some time, no doubt, she would know everything: circumstances would bring it before her if the world and Damaris ever became acquainted; and if not, if obscurity became the child's lot, and failure the issue of her dreams, then it would be better that Nadine, who had no pity for the one or sympathy with the other, should hear nought of her. He did not care to dwell himself on the possibilities of the future of one who seemed to him so ill fitted for the prosaic brutalities of a struggle for fame: he had temporised with her destiny, and vaguely trusted to some sequence of fair chances to drift the barque of her life into some safe haven. Of the pure and chivalrous tenderness for her which he felt, he would have been ashamed to speak to any living soul: for who would have believed him?
'How difficult it is to do a little good!' he thought, as he drove through the deep glades of his own woods, through the cool, dewy, windless air of a summer evening towards the great castle which had once known the Valois kings. 'Now, if I wished to do the most brutal, selfish, hellish thing on earth, how easy it would be! I should find the whole world conspiring to help me, and should buy souls as easily as if they were oysters!'