She went up a few wooden stairs and opened the door of the little chamber, of which she had made her study. It had an open fireplace, and wood was burning on the hearth; its lattice window showed the wintry landscape. It was simple, but looked like the room of an artist: the books, the engravings, the water-colour sketches, the little statuettes he had sent there to make it habitable and picturesque, gave it that air of culture without which a palace is no better than a barn; a copper bowl was filled with ivy and bay and holly, there were some snowdrops in a glass which stood before a small bronze he had sent there, in the summer, of a Greek shepherd playing on a reed. What there was of art and decoration there was of his providing; but still a certain grace of arrangement and harmony of tones were due to her and to the same instincts in her which had made of her sea balcony on Bonaventure a little hermitage dedicated to the few nightingales and the many sea-swallows, and, amidst the sordid cares and the harsh accents which were around her, had enabled her to hear the voice of Ruy Blas or of Fortunio, as, hid in the orange-grove, she had read through drowsy noons in
A dim house of happy leaves, with shadows populous.
As he looked around this chamber with its union of elegance and rusticity, there passed over his mind the consciousness of how utterly his wife would mistake the motive which had brought him there, the feeling which had prompted him to have this child surrounded, as far as it was possible, with such simple pleasures as art and nature can bestow on poetic temperaments. The world was always with her; its influences had saturated her mind and coloured her judgments too deeply for her ever to judge otherwise than as the world would do. To her as to the world, if ever either became aware of this home which he had made for another woman under the ash-trees of Les Hameaux, he could only seem the protector of Damaris in a very different sense to that in which he actually was so. The certainty of such inevitable judgment oppressed him, and obscured to him the beauty of the girl's face, the lovely freshness and fervour of her welcome.
The one great love of his life had been so long his only preoccupation, his only idolatry, that it hurt him with a sense of loss and of insult to think that to others it would seem as though he had been faithless to it. Even the sense which was present to his own heart and mind, that such infidelity might perchance become possible to him, humiliated him in his own eyes and made him feel a weak, irresolute, mutable fool.
'Perhaps she is right enough to disdain me!' he thought with impatience of himself.
His thoughts were far more with her than with Damaris; and yet the poor child's welcome of him sunk into his heart with a sense of warmth and of sympathy, to which he had long been a stranger. Her very personal beauty, too, seemed to retain in it the glow of her own suns, and to give to those who looked on it a vivifying warmth and radiance. He felt as though, in leaving the presence of his wife for hers, he had come out of the cool pale luminance of moonlight, shining on the classic limbs of a marble goddess, into a sunlit and fragrant garden, with birds at play amongst wild boughs of roses.
Absorbed in his own meditations, his words were dreamy and spoken with effort, his abstraction affected the sensitive nerves of his companion and cast a chill upon her buoyant and ardent nature. She grew silent, and watched him with eyes passionate with gratitude and dim with tears. She saw in him the saviour of her life, the lord of all her thoughts, her only friend; she longed to throw herself at his feet and strive to tell him all she felt. But she could not, she dared not; there was something in his voice, in his gaze, in the mere fact of his presence, which daunted and held her dumb. In his absence she had repeated to herself a thousand times the eloquent words with which she would tell him all she felt; but now that he was there before her, she was mute. The colour came and went in her expressive face, the veins in her throat swelled with emotion; she could find nothing to say which was worth saying; when she spoke in the words of the poets she was eloquent, but when she could only look in her own heart and long to speak, how poor she seemed to herself, how dull and dumb!
The intensity of the happiness his presence brought with it, in itself bewildered and alarmed her with a vague fear to which she could have given no name had she tried. She had been happy in her childhood upon Bonaventure, with the happiness of youth and health and vigour; the happiness of the fawn in the fernbrake, of the swallow on the wing; unconscious, delightful, instinctive happiness in the mere sense of sentient life. But this happiness which she felt now was new to her, and closely allied to pain, and nervous as its twin-sister, sorrow; she was afraid of it and mute.
At last she broke the silence timidly:
'There was something I thought I would write to tell you because he is one of your friends, but then I thought it did not matter. It was only that M. de Béthune has been here twice or three times.'