The voice of Rosselin shook a little as he answered, 'My child I want you to do what she cannot. These people have all things; they have ease and mirth, and soft beds, and minds without care, and great riches, and great palaces, and great powers, but there are two things which often escape them, and ofttimes the poor have the one and now and then they are born to the other. I mean that great consoler of the humble, content, and that great redresser of injustice, genius. You have the latter. In your sea-gull's nest the Muses found you. Oh, child, be grateful! You are richer than the kings who ruled here in Paris—if only you knew your riches!'
She looked up at him suddenly, pushing her troubled curls out of her eyes.
'If I spoke before her my throat would dry up—my voice would be strangled in it. If I were to do well, she would never care. If I were to fail, she would smile. I should see her smile in my grave. He loves her you know, he loves her so much, but she has made his heart numb in him with her indifference and her scorn.'
He was awed and amazed at such intensity of dread in a nature which had always seemed to him bold as the winds, and resolute and headstrong.
'Yes,' he said, almost brutally. 'If you fail she will smile, she will laugh; she knows nothing of failure. But you will not fail. Only the weak fail. You are strong. You will not let that woman think that you threw away your genius for love of her lord!'
They were words which were hard and rough and brutal; but they seemed to him the wisest words that he could speak. She was a child with a passionate heart half broken; unless that heart were torn out and trodden under her foot, he thought that she would never walk straight to where the laurels, the bitter laurels, grew.
He meant to do well; he spoke according to his light; but he was only a man and childless, and forgot a little what easily bruised things the hearts of some women are when they are very young, and have hot blood in their veins, and are all alone in a world which feels to them as the stony road of the moorland feels to the shot doe when there is many a long mile to be covered between her and the herd.
She turned her head from him quickly, and he saw the dark red flush which stained her throat.
She did not answer. The words brought no solace to her. Her heart was empty. He saw the great tears roll slowly down her cheeks. He realised that the hilt of this two-edged sword which he held out to her was too cold a pillow for so young a breast.