'My dear,' answered Rosselin with a smile, which for once was sad, 'I am that most melancholy of all things—an artist who was once great and now is old?'
She took his hand with reverence and kissed it.
'Va!' said the man whom the world had adored, with a little laugh which had emotion it. 'Va! Life is always worth living. The flowers always smell sweet and the sunshine is always warm. And so you, too, would be an artist, would you? Well, well! every spring there are young birds to fill the old nests.'
When he left her he was long silent. When he at last spoke, he said briefly to Othmar: 'Elle a de l'avenir.'
CHAPTER XXIX.
The day after Othmar went alone to the green shadows of the vale of Port-Royal. It was five o'clock in the afternoon when he reached there: he saw Damaris before she saw him; all her rural habits and associations had come to her in this leafy and rustic place; she rose with the sun and went to bed with it; she had recovered her colour and her strength; she assisted in the out-of-door work and rejoiced in it. As he drew near he saw her mowing a swath of the autumnal aftermath of the little field, the two watch dogs of Bonaventure, which he had bought and restored to her, lying near and watching her with loving eyes. Her arms, vigorous as a youth's and white as a swan's neck, were seen bare to the shoulder in the swaying sweep of the scythe; her hair was bound closely round her head, and its dark gold glistened in the sun. The veins in her throat stood out in the effort of the movement; the linen of her bodice heaved and fell. It was an attitude which Rude or Clésinger would have given ten years of their lives to reproduce in marble; it was the perfection of full and youthful female strength and health, teeming with all the promise of a perfect organisation, all the vitality which makes strong mothers of strong men.
It was womanhood; not the womanhood of the mondaines, delicate and fragile as a hothouse flower, pale from late hours or faintly tinted with the resources of art, serene and harmonious in tone, in charm, in manner, the most perfect of all the products of artificial culture; but womanhood as it was when the earth was young, and when life was simple and straight as a rod of hazel; womanhood buoyant, healthful, forceful, fearless; with limbs uncramped by fashion and beauty ignorant of art, living in the wind, in the water, in the grass, in the sun, like the dappled cattle and the strong-winged bird.
He watched her awhile, himself unseen. With what grace, yet with what vigour, she moved the scythe, sweeping round her in its wide semicircle, the long grass falling about her in green billows, with trails of bindweed and tall red heads of clover in it; beyond her, the blue sky and the pastoral horizon of the vast wheat-fields of La Beauce.