Love is not to be commanded, and naught less than a great and undivided love could ever have given happiness and faith in itself to so delicate, to so sensitive, to so perfectly and sincerely humble a nature as that of the dead girl whose bridal hours had been passed in those closed chambers, around whose casements the ivy climbed and the swallows nested undisturbed as the seasons passed. The rough, sharp, upbraiding words of Blanche de Laon smarted in his memory, as the cut of a knife smarts in the flesh. They only repeated in coarse emphasis what his own conscience had said to him ever since he had found the little manuscript poems in the drawer with the faded roses. Before then, with the blindness of a man whose whole soul is centred on another passion than the one which claims his sympathy, he had never once dreamed that the death of Yseulte had been self sought.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Damaris, meanwhile, was altogether at ease as to her own circumstances. No doubt ever entered her mind as to the legacy bequeathed by her grandfather; it was more than enough for all her wants, and she understood that she could live at Les Hameaux easily, all her lifetime, if she chose. But without any apprehension for her future, she was not without that unrest which is the inseparable companion of all ambition. The remembrance of the wife of Othmar was like a thorn in her side: she had an eager, passionate, thirsty desire to justify herself in the sight of that great lady, to become something which could not be derided or denied or set aside with contempt. The memory of that day under the roof of St. Pharamond was continually with her, in all its humiliation and its disappointment, and its sharp cruel sense of being a barbarian amongst the highest grace and culture that were possible to human life and manners. It had been a glimpse into an unknown land never to be forgotten; the gates to it had been shut in her face, almost as soon as opened; but the dreams which had come to her through them remained with her, and pursued her sleeping and waking.
She threw herself into the resources of study with a kind of passion. In books, she thought, lay all the secrets of the spells of power.
When he had bidden her wed a farmer of La Beauce he had wounded her in a way that she could not forget; not because she despised that homelier life of the husbandman, but because she thought that he deemed her incapable of the higher life of the intellect or the soul. She had been violently uprooted from all her childish associations, and severed from all the habits, thoughts, and attachments which had been hers from birth. The shock of that separation had intensified and deepened the sensitive side of her nature, and subdued the sanguine insouciance of it. She was not happy at Les Hameaux as she had been happy on Bonaventure; but she was still companioned by many dreams, and still full of high courage, though the dreams had lost something of their splendid phantasy, and the courage had lost something of its rash undoubting faith.
At times she longed for her old playmate, the sea, with a curious painful yearning—the yearning of the home-sickness of the exile.
'How well I can understand,' she said once to Rosselin, 'that Napoleon longed all his life for the smell of the earth of Corsica. All my life I am sure I shall smell the smell of the fresh sea water leaping up in the wind under the orange boughs and the bay leaves; there is nothing like it here, though the pastures smell sweet in the dew.'
In a short time she had changed much. She had become still taller, and the peachlike bloom of her face had paled. She had the look in her eyes of one who studies assiduously the great thoughts of great writers; she had a less childlike and boylike beauty, and one more intellectual and spiritual. Months count as years at her age, and the southern blood of the Bérardes matured early.