CHAPTER XXXVI.
The days slipped one after another away, and he had still said nothing to her of Damaris. He seldom saw her alone; when he did so, no opening had presented itself which seemed to him propitious. The length of time which he had unwisely allowed to elapse now created an additional difficulty. She might, if he told her now, naturally ask why he had been silent so long. He had made no intentional concealment; anyone of the household knew that the girl had been there in the summer and throughout her illness. But no one, not even her most confidential attendants, would ever have ventured to tell their mistress anything unasked. She held them at a distance, which the boldest of them never dared to pass. The only servant she had treated with more familiarity had been the little African boy Mahmoud; and Mahmoud had died, in his fifteenth year, from the cruel north winds of Northern Europe, babbling in his delirium to the last, in Arabic, words of his lady and his love for her, poor little tropical beast! killed as men kill the antelope kid of the desert when they drag it from its groves of palm and its warm golden sands, to shiver and perish behind the bars of a cage in a northern menagerie.
Not one of the household spoke, or would ever speak, of anything which ever took place unknown to their mistress; but they knew, doubtless—as servants in great cities know all the affairs of their employers—that the young girl who had been ill there, brought in from the streets in the bygone summer, was dwelling at Les Hameaux, and was occasionally visited by their master. Partly from their gossiping when outside his walls, and partly from other causes, the name of Damaris Bérarde began to be bruited about in Paris. A secret is very like a subtle odour; it escapes by unseen crevices and passes to the outer air, though every egress may be barred. A certain vague rumour arose that not only had Rosselin discovered some new and great talent which he was training for the public stage, but that with this hidden life which was so carefully concealed the name of Othmar was connected.
Had Blanche de Laon been accused of first setting afloat that breath of calumny, she would have declared, and truthfully, 'Moi? Je n'ai jamais soufflé mot!'
Yet she had conveyed a hint into the air, and it was sufficient. One thistle-seed is enough to choke a field with thistles.
In vain do we think we walk in private paths unseen; some eyes are forever there to peer through the thickest hedge; some lips are forever ready to say what they do not know, and magnify the harmless mouse-ear to a wonder-flower with a poisoned root. Those of whom rumour thus discourses with bated breath and comprehensive gesture are seldom or never aware that they are the subject of such whispers; they are always the last to imagine that their acts are put under the magnifying-lenses of public speculation.
Even Rosselin, with his intimate knowledge of the inquisitiveness and the loquacity of human nature, did not dream that the mere fact of his going twice or thrice a week to Les Hameaux and taking a neophyte to the temples of his own art, to quiet morning recitations, could be a fact of any import to the world at large. He had had so many pupils, and he never remembered that the world had had any concern with them unless they had become ultimately great enough to challenge and compel its languid attention; and even then its notice had been very hard to obtain, Why should it break its rule of universal apathy and indifference towards those who are obscure because a young girl lived on a farm in the pastoral solitudes which had once sheltered Racine?
Both he and Othmar, in very different ways, had a reserve and hauteur of manner which always kept at arm's length rash intruders and trivial questioners. Therefore they were the last persons on earth to hear anything of what rumour murmured of either of them. Damaris, in her simple home under the ashes and elms of the Croix Blanche, was not more isolated from the gossip of the world than they both were by choice and temperament. But the world gossiped not the less but the more for the immunity which their ignorance permitted to it, and because it knew little invented much.
The world to whom Othmar's was so familiar and conspicuous a name built for him a tall edifice of lies down in those innocent pastures of Les Hameaux. But he was unconscious of that house of fable in which they made him dwell. He believed that his own abstention from any visits there made Damaris as safe from notice as though she were still beneath the orange leaves and olive shadows of her isle. If she wanted anything or any counsel, Rosselin would tell him he felt sure. At times the memory of her, as he had left her standing in the evening dusk amongst the red-brown seeding grasses, made him desire to see her with a wish he restrained. Sometimes the recollection of her flushed, bowed face, as he had touched her forehead with his lips, came over him with an emotion which was too gentle for desire, too kind for passion; but he resisted it.