CHAPTER XXVIII.
In lieu of driving homeward to Paris that day, he turned his horses' heads in the direction of Asnières, where a once famous artist, David Rosselin, lived.
'I will ask Rosselin,' he thought. 'Rosselin can judge as I have no power to do; and if he decide that she has genius she had better make a career so for herself. I have no business to stand between her and any future she may be able to create.'
He disliked the idea of his wife's careless predictions being fulfilled. It seemed to him barbarous to let this white-souled sea-bird soar to the electric-flame life in Paris, fancying its light the sun. But who could tell?
It was a doubt which troubled and oppressed him as he drove back to Paris through the pastoral country, consecrated by the memory of Port-Royal. He felt that he had no right to make himself the arbiter of her destinies; he would be no more to her in her future than the dead thinkers whose brains had once been quick with philosophic and poetic creation amidst these quiet green meadows.
So he opened the little green trellis-work gate which was set in the acacia hedge of the cottage at Asnières, and found the once great impersonator of Alceste, of Tartuffe, of Sganarelle sitting beside his beehives and behind his rose-beds, with a white sun umbrella shading his comely and silvered head, and in his hand a miniature Aldine Plautus. His old servant was close by carefully dusting the cobwebs off the branches of an espaliered nectarine.
It was a small suburban villa which sheltered the last years of the great actor; a square white house set in a garden, over whose trim hedges of clipped acacia Rosselin could see the groups of students and work-girls going down to the landing-stairs of the Seine, and farther yet could see the grey-green shine of the river itself with its pleasure craft going to and fro in the midsummer sunshine.
David Rosselin in his prime had made many millions of francs, but they had gone as fast as they were gained, and in his old age he was poor: he had only this little square white box, so gay in summer with its roses and wistaria, and within it some few remnants of those magnificent gifts which nations and sovereigns and women and artists had all alike showered upon him in those far-off years of his greatness; and some souvenir from Othmar of an Aldine classic, or a volume bound by Clovis, which had lain on his table some New Year morning.
Othmar, who was quickly wearied by men in general, appreciated the intelligence and the character of this true philosophe sans le savoir, and would have made Rosselin free of all his libraries and welcome at all his houses if the old man would have left for them his white-walled and rose-covered cottage at Asnières.
'No one who is old,' said Rosselin, 'should ever go out, though he may receive, because he knows that those whom he receives care to see him, or they would not come to him; but how can he be ever sure that those who invite him do not do so out of charity, out of pity, out of complacency?'