'Who was she?'
He told her, with the pathetic force of a profound sympathy; for poor Frou-frou had been well known to him in her brief career, and all the feverish yearning, the tumult of unsatisfied desires, the conflict of genius and malady in that tender and hapless soul had been sacred to him. He passed in silence over the passions of that life, but he dwelt long and earnestly on its storm-tossed youth, and its premature and tragic close.
Damaris listened; her whole countenance reflecting the narrative she heard.
'I think she was happy,' she said at length. 'You do not, but I do. She broke her heart singing, like the nightingales in the poem. I read once of a sword which wore out its scabbard. Who would not sooner be that than the sword which rusts unused?'
Othmar did not reply. To him the life and the death of Aimée Desclée were the saddest of his generation; but he could not tell this child why he thought them so, and even if he could have done it would have been of no avail. He knew that he argued with that thing which no example appals, no warning affects, no prescience intimidates; the thing at once so strong and so feeble, at once blind as the bat and far-sighted as the eagle—the instinct of genius.
When he quitted her that day he left her with disquietude and uncertainty. It seemed to him as if he held her fate, like a bird, in his hand, and could either close the cage-door on it in safety, or toss it upward free to roam through fields of air or to sink under showers of stones as chance might choose.
He believed that she did not deceive herself when she thought that she could move others by the electric forces within herself. He recognised a certain volition in her which resembled that of genius. Her imagination, which could console her for so much, her quick assimilation of high thoughts and poetic fancies, her power of feeling impersonal interest, her very ignorance of real life, and imprudence in its circumstances, were all those of genius. Reared in prosaic habits, she had forced her own way to a subjective and idealistic mental life, even amidst the most opposing influences. She had heard the nightingale in the orange-boughs, though all those around her had been only busied counting the oranges to pack the crates. She had watched the shoal of fishes spread its silver over the waves beneath the moon, though all those around her at such a sight had only thought of the deep sea seine, the casks for market, and the curing brine. Surely this power of withdrawing from all familiar association, and escaping from all compelling forces of habit, could only exist where genius begat it?
But then he knew that even with the wedding-garment of genius on, yet to the wedding-feast of fame many are called but few are chosen. And it might be only a breath, a flash, a touch of inspiration, un brin de génie, as his wife had said, enough to have impelled her to push open the doors of her narrow destiny, and look thence with longing eyes, but not enough to force her with untired feet and unconquerable courage across that desert of effort which parts effort from triumph, poetic faculty from mere dreamy indolence. He who had always from his boyhood honoured and assisted talent, wherever he had found it, with a patience and a liberality very rare in this world, had suffered much disappointment from many ordinary and pretentious lives which he had been led to believe had had the hall-mark of intellectual superiority. He had too often found what deemed itself genius was mere facility; originality, mere eccentricity; ambition mere instinct of imitation; the 'coal from the altar' only the momentary blaze of a match. Many and many a time he might have said of the immature Muses who sought him, in the words of Victor Hugo, 'Que de jeunes filles j'ai vues mourir!'
Damaris Bérarde appeared to him, as to his wife, a beautiful child with an uncommon nature, and with possibly uncommon gifts; but between the mere promise of the dawn of youth and the full heat of the meridian of genius what a difference there was!