CHAPTER XXXIV.
One evening in October Rosselin walked beside his pupil amongst the fields of Les Hameaux. She had had her lesson in elocution in the afternoon; a lesson in which he was inexorably hard to please, a very tyrant over all the minutiæ of accent and of expression; and now in the walks at sunset he had relaxed into all that benignity and bonhomie which were most natural to him in the company of women and of children.
'I am afraid I do not please you,' she had said with some dejection.
'If you did not, my dear, do you think I would come thrice a week to Chevreuse to train you?' he answered. 'It is because you have exceeding natural talent, because you have uncommon gifts, a flexible and beautiful voice, quick perceptions, and that intuitive comprehension which is the innermost soul of art, that I deal with you harshly to compel you to acquire all that artificial treatment of your own powers which is absolutely indispensable to success. If I had not seen genius in you it would not have been merely to please Othmar that I would have told you to give yourself to art; I should have said to you, on the contrary: "Go and marry a farmer of La Beauce, spin and sew, and wear a silk gown on Sundays; have any number of children; be an ordinary woman in a word."'
'Marry a farmer of La Beauce!'
She coloured with indignation. Was it not what Othmar himself had said to her?
'It is not a life to be despised,' continued Rosselin. 'They live in corn as the crickets do. You, who are so fond of country things, would be happy enough if—if—you had never read Racine and Hugo, if you had not that fermentation of the fancy in you which seethes and stirs and smokes until out of it comes the wine of genius. The swallows cannot stay in the fields as the linnets do. There is something in them that makes them go when the hour is come. They do not know what it is; they obey an imperious instinct. They cannot stay if they would. They go blindly, and very often they drop down dead in mid-ocean, and never see the rose fields of Persia or the magnolia woods of Hindostan, as they meant to do; yet they go.'
Unknown to herself, a strong impulse moved her to prove to the wife of Othmar that the brin de génie was hers; a true bough of laurel, not a spurious weed. The indifference and the oblivion of this, the first great lady she had ever seen, still remained in her memory with the sting of an affront which nothing could efface. The world was represented to her eyes by that one delicate, smiling, negligent, cruel critic, whom she passionately admired, whom she unconsciously challenged. The child had no vanity, but she had great pride; the pride of the aristocrat and the pride of the republican had been inherited by her, each stubborn as the other. Her pride had been wounded, and her ambition and her dreams excited. She knew that she might drop, like the tired swallow that crosses the sea, into the deep abyss of failure and oblivion; but, like the swallow, the instinct which moved her was irresistible.
Rosselin saw that it was so, and he was too utterly an artist in every fibre of his being to be able to prevail on himself to discourage her wholly. He believed that she would become the glory of the French stage; that very union of the strength of the peasant and the delicacy of the patrician, which was so marked in her physically and mentally, seemed to him to possess that rare originality which all those destined to be great in any art are stamped with from their birth. He did not admit to her how much he admired her, but when she recited to him at one lesson those passages which had been set to her at a previous one, he was secretly amazed at the justness of her reading of them, the accuracy of her rendering, and he marvelled where in her simple life, set between sea and sky as it had been, she had reached such understanding of the greatest utterances of great minds.
'Yet what a fool I am to wonder,' he thought a moment later. 'As if it were not always so with genius, or as if anything less than that ever could be genius.'