'Of course not. But it is horrible. Publicity is a kind of violation——'
'Recompensed like Danaë's!'
Othmar was silent. He was conscious that a strong personal dislike to her leaving the safe shadow of private life moved him to an exaggerated objection to her being seen and known by others. When once the world had beheld her, she would belong to the world. It might make her triumphant or it might make her wretched, but she would belong to it evermore.
Rosselin guessed what he was feeling, and answered his unspoken thoughts.
'Yes; she will never go back either to Les Hameaux or to Bonaventure. That is certain. She will belong to all men, in a sense, when once she has sought their suffrages. But what else can be done with her? What else? You would not hear of a conventional marriage for her and a house in the suburbs, and I suppose she would not hear of it either. She is half a poet, half a thing of the open air like a doe or a swallow. You cannot send her back whence she came. If you could do it in fact, you could not do it in spirit. The soul would never be the same—poor white seabird of a soul, which comes across the flames of ambition and burns in them! You might set her body down under her orange-boughs, under her blue sky, but you could not give her the heart of her childhood. You are a god in your way; the only god the nineteenth century knows—a rich man—but to do that is beyond your power.'
'If I had that power I should be a god indeed!' said Othmar bitterly, 'and the whole sick world would come to me to be cured.'
He needed not the words of Rosselin to remind him that never would he be able to undo the work his wife had done in one idle moment of imperious caprice.
Though the words were harsh and, in a great measure, unjust to him, he did not resent them; he poignantly regretted the fate brought on Damaris, and when he saw her he felt a reproach greater than any which others could address to him. The breaking up of the happy simplicity of her life had always seemed to him as wanton an act as to shoot a seabird which falls in the sea.
Had he said so to his wife she would have laughed, and have denied all responsibility. She would have declared that fate, in some guise or another, always finds out female children with handsome faces; that Strephon always comes to them, or Faust. But he would not look at it thus. To him it always seemed the cruellest unkindness needlessly to have brought Damaris Bérarde and the world together.
'Why does he dislike a public career for her so much?' thought Rosselin. 'I do not think that he cares for her, except in kindness. I do not think he would give her any part of his own life. Passion has died in him, died under the coldness of his wife's nature, as flowers die in frost. This child would give him, I daresay, all the richness and all the heat of her own heart, but he would only give her in return les cendres tièdes d'un feu éteint, and, as he is a man more generous and more sensitive than most, he would never forgive himself for having sacrificed her to himself. Better for her all the dangers of life in the world than the consuming love for one who would never love her as she loved. Had I been the confessor of Louise de la Vallière, I should have said to her, "Remain in the crowds of Versailles if you wish to forget: do not go into solitude." No woman forgets who has no one to teach her forgetfulness. Solitude is the nurse of all great passions, because in solitude there is no standard of comparison!'