He let her alone until the piece was over; the box of the Countess Othmar had been vacated some moments before the termination of the last act. He did not speak to her whilst he hurried her through private passages and into the frosty air of the streets.
'Cover yourself well, it is cold,' was all he said as he took her with gentle steps over the pavement which his feet had trodden so many thousands of times, in the hurry of youth, in the ecstasy of triumph, in all the alternations of a manhood tossed up and down upon the stormy seas of public favour and of public caprice. All that network of streets about the Français was as dear to him as the banks of Doon to Burns, as the green wood and ways of Milly to Lamartine, as the sweet meads and streams of Penshurst to Philip Sydney.
Damaris walked on beside him, her head bent, her face covered. The tears were rolling slowly down her cheeks.
'Let me do what I would,' she thought, 'she would not care.'
Rosselin took her home to his own little house that night, for it was too late to return to Les Hameaux. He made her seat herself by his fire; he dried the damp of the night on her hair and her clothes; he would have made her eat of his preserved nectarines and drink of his choice wines which were sent by his friends. But she would not touch anything. She sat lost in thought.
All she saw was that beautiful woman; all she heard was the voice of Othmar saying, 'I have so loved her that I shall never love any other woman ever again.'
No doubt it was so: she could understand. Only he seemed to go away from her, herself, utterly and for ever; to glide out of her life as the ships she had used to watch from her balcony, as the nightingales sang under the moon, used to pass away further and further, till the great distance and the shadows of night swallowed them up and they were no more seen, and all the wide sea was empty.
Rosselin watched her sadly.
'Poor Mignon,' he thought. 'Who shall transform her to a Mademoiselle Mars? How does the gymnast teach his child to stand and catch the metal ball, to tread and hold the rope in air. He works and kneads the tender flesh till it grows hard, he strains the soft limbs till they become like steel, he bends and twists and forces, and forges the immature sinews and tendons till they are like cords to resist, and in every separate muscle there almost seems a separate brain. When their nature has been driven out and the body has become an iron machine the teacher has succeeded. Who shall do for her mind and her heart what the gymnast does to his son's limbs and spine? And will ever anybody do it? Will she ever be Mars—be Rachel? Will she ever fling her soul away and keep only her body and her brain? And if she do not do that what success will she ever have?'
In that kind of cruelty with which the true artist would always emulate any living thing to art, he almost wished that Othmar were a man with less honour and less compassion, more license and more selfishness.