Othmar

by Ouida

'But you do not know——.' He left his reply unfinished.

Standing in the green warm meadow, with the light of afternoon shed on it, and the golden haze of a late summer day on its horizon, his thoughts were full of all the many things in life of which she could imagine nothing. All the passions and pleasures and disgusts, all the desires and satisfactions and satieties, all the tumult and vanity and nausea and giddy haste of life in the world—what could she tell of these? She would be handsome and young and alone; what would that world not teach her in a year, a month, an hour? Self-consciousness first; then, with that knowledge, all else.

As, to her, having never known anything but the close limits of peasant life, the world which she did not know assumed the colours and the rejoicing of a vast borealis pageantry, so to him, by whom the world was known like an oft-read Virgil, it seemed that the safety, the quietude, the daily round of simple duties, undisturbed by ambition within or by contention from without, which the life of the peasant afforded, was a kind of happiness, a positive security from which any safe within it were ill-advised to wander.

Of all wretched creatures the déclassée seemed to him to be the most wretched. He had reproached his wife with the effort to make this child one of those pitiful anomalies, and he now reproached himself with doing the same unkindness.

Damaris was a déclassée; she could never more return to the order of life whence she had come. Ever since some indistinct glory for herself had been suggested to her by the thoughtless words of the great lady who had represented Fate to her, she had been haunted by the desire for an existence wholly unlike that to which she had been born and by which she had been surrounded. It had been only a very few hours which she had passed under the roof of St. Pharamond, but that short space had been long enough to make her conceive a world wholly inconceivable to her before, a world in which art and luxury were things of daily habit, in which leisure and loveliness and gaiety and ease were matters of course, like the coming and going of time, in which personal graces and personal charm were all cultured as the flowers were cultured under glass; in which even for her there might become possible the fruition of all manner of gorgeous indefinite visions, born out of the suggestions of poets and the phantasmagoria of romantic books—a world in which all she had humbly longed for, as she had listened to the nightingales in the orange thickets, would become visible to her and possessed.

She was a déclassée: not in the vulgar sense, but in the sadder meaning of a young life uprooted from its natural soil and filled with desires, aspirations, dreams, which made all that was actually within her grasp valueless to her. That one night, in which she had seen around her the destinies which appeared to her like a tale of fairy-land, had impressed her imagination with indelible memories and her heart with ineffaceable wishes. He, who only saw in the life of his own world tedium, inanity, stupidity, extravagance, monotonous repetition, could not guess what enchantment its externals had worn to her. He, who was tired of the unvaried paths of that garden of pleasure whose habitués only see that in it 'grove nods to grove, each alley has its fellow,' could not divine what a paradise it had looked to this young waif and stray, who had been only able to catch one glimpse of its beauties through the golden bars of its shut gates. To him her wish for the world appeared the most pathetic of errors, the most pitiable of blunders, a very madness of unwise choice. Had not the world been with him always, and what had it given him? Possibly it had in reality given him much more than he remembered: it had given him culture with all its charms, and courtesy with all its graces; it had given him the great powers which lie in wealth, and the great light which shines from knowledge. But then he was so used to these he counted them not, and the world only wore to him the aspect of a monster devouring all leisure, all simplicity, all repose, driving all mankind before it in a breathless chase of swiftly escaping hours; and to her this monster would be ravenous as a wolf, cruel as it could never be to any man! It would take everything from her, and only give her in return worthless gifts of ruinous passions, of consuming fevers, of poisoned fruits, of fierce desires.

It seemed to him as if he saw some young child coming gaily through the grasses, clasping all unconscious to its breast a mass of smoking dynamite, and deeming it a kindly playfellow.

And it was impossible to warn her in words brutal enough to scare her from her purpose. He could not say to her, 'Men are beasts, and women are worse: there are hideous pleasures, hateful appetites, cruel temptations, of which you know nothing, but which will all crowd on your knowledge and grow to your taste, once you are in the midst of them. The world will embrace you, but as the bull embraced the Christian maiden forced to appear as Pasiphaë in the circus of Nero. Be wise while there is time. Stay in the clean, clear daylight of a country life. Its paths are narrow and few, they only lead from the hearth to the door, from the door to the brook or the mill; but you may walk in them safe and content, and teach your children to follow your steps. Peace of mind is the sweetest thing upon earth; but it is like the wood-sorrel, it only grows in shady, quiet, homely places. No one has it in the world.'

But he thought these thoughts, and did not say them. He looked at her standing with dew-wet feet amongst the seeding grasses, the warm fresh air about her, the blue sky above, and he thought of her in the atmosphere of a supper-room in Paris, with the smoke, and the perfumes, and the odours of the wines, and beside her men with swimming lascivious eyes, and drôlesses with flushed faces and indecent gestures. He would not take her there, but others would.