She did not reply.
'Cannot you trust me to know what is best for you?' said Rosselin, still with anger and upbraiding. 'I have arranged everything. You will go down to Beaugency to-night with me; rest one day, rehearse twice or thrice there, and on the next play the part at Amyôt. It will be perfectly easy. You are neither weak nor nervous, though you are impressionable and take strange loves and hatreds. All is arranged; I have your costumes ordered; the people who will act with you are all my friends, and will aid you in every way. God in heaven! What can you hesitate for? What can you want? At your age had I had such an opportunity to take my place at a bound on the highest steps of French art I should have gone mad with joy!'
Damaris was silent. Her face was in shadow and he could not see its expression.
'Does he wish it, you say?' she asked in a low voice.
'Othmar? Yes, I believe so. He gave his permission for such a presentation of you to his wife months ago; he will be present, and he will certainly be glad to see your triumph. He knows well that there is no other life possible for you. You cannot go back to the life you left; you will not be content with the paths of obscurity; you have touched the enchanted cup and you must go on to drink of it, whether you will or no. There are a score of reasons, which it is not necessary to detail, why it is much to be desired that you should be seen first at Amyôt, beyond all other places. I think you should trust me. I am not likely to mislead you after having passed so many months in striving to develop the talents Nature has given you. Your natural gifts are great; if you do not throw them away in a passion of mistaken feelings or of childish despair you may live to reign in France as a woman of genius can reign in no other country in the world. You make me angry to see you so—Othmar's wife! What is Othmar's wife to you that you should fret your soul for her? What matter to you, child, are your own gifts, your own future, your own victory? Love Art and follow it. It will be more faithful to you than any lover that lives!'
She still did not reply.
He grew impatient and indignant with her. He had the conviction which is so sincere in a great artist, that all passions, affections, joys, woes and desires, loves and hatreds, were of no weight whatever put in the scale with Art and with renown. He had given up his whole existence to Art, and now that he was old his devotion to it had remained in him whilst he had forgotten the force and the despair of the affections and of the passions when they govern the early years of life.
It seemed to him intolerable, incredible, that the mere weight and sway of Othmar's memory should stand for a moment in the same scale with her as her destiny in the world, her place in fame. As a youth he himself had swept away all the flowers of feeling whenever they had threatened to choke the growing laurel of his genius: why could she not do the same? Was it because she was weak with the weakness of women?
After love there is nothing so cruel as the tyrannies of art, and Rosselin was art incarnated. Moreover he believed in the magnetism and vivifying force of unexpected events and of sudden emotions. They were a portion of those drastic and searching medicines with which he thought an imperfectly developed genius needs treatment. Once he had wished and wished sincerely that Damaris Bérarde should remain in the cool and shady paths of private life; but he had long ceased to wish it; he was impatient for the world to crown the novitiate on which he had bestowed so much care and labour.
The thought of the fêtes at Amyôt captivated and stimulated his own imagination. They seemed to him the occasion she most needed; a very frame of Renaissance carvings, in which the portrait of Célimène as portrayed by Damaris would show in its finest colours and its finest lines. He dreaded for her the coarse and ugly trivialities of a theatre with its throng of actors, its imperious direction, its hired applause, its niggard criticisms; he feared that she would feel in it like a hind caught in the toils, would rebel against it all and flee. But at Amyôt it would be pure art which would claim her, refined praise which would salute her, an atmosphere of delicacy, of culture, of magnificence which would be about her. If such a scene and such a stimulant would not arouse all the soul slumbering in her, then he thought that he would be ready to confess: 'I mistake; she has no genius; let her go and till the earth and reap its fruits; of the fruits of art she shall have none.'