'I seem to speak harshly no doubt,' he pursued, 'for you cannot see in my heart, and for the first time since I have known you, you refuse to believe in my judgment. I tell you that your idea is absurd, that Othmar will never attribute to you the motives you fancy; he is too wise and too generous, and no one could look at you, child, and think of you an ignoble thing. You may be a great artist if you choose. If you are not that, you will be of all creatures the most wretched, for you will live against all the instincts of your nature, against all the bend of your mind. What made you, when you read your poets on your island, dream of a life wholly unknown to you, if not the forces of genius which made you dissatisfied where you were, and cried to you "Go." Fate has been kind to you: it has set open the door; it has left you free. If you are thankless and refuse what it offers, you will deserve to perish in misery.'
She was still quite silent.
'But what will become of you?' he cried in his amazement and his grief. 'Child, you are so young, you cannot pass all your life living down all the vital powers that are in you. Genius struggles like a child in the womb to force its way out to light. You cannot go against your nature. What will you do? What will you do? We have made you for ever unfit for the existence to which you were born. If you do not go and sit where Fame beckons you now, you will stay out in the cold, friendless and homeless for life. Have I not told you so before? There is nothing on earth so wretched as the genius which is born to speak, yet fettered by circumstance, stands dumb.'
She heard, but she remained unmoved. She was but a child, and she had a great hopeless passion shut in her heart, and the vileness of the world had touched her like the saliva of an unclean beast, and what could the fame which such a world could give seem ever worth to her? All the youth and the warmth, and the awaking senses and the wasted tenderness in her all yearned for gentler, simpler, tenderer things, than the glittering corselet of fame and the noisy applause of a crowd. Rosselin was so used to being all alone himself so many a year, that he could not measure the loneliness of a girl who has no mother to weep with her, no sister to laugh with her, no lover to kiss the dewy roses of her lips. He forgot that when he spoke to her of fame and of art, all her young life called out in her, 'Ah—where is love?'
He stayed until late in the evening, bringing to bear on her all the arguments and all the persuasions of which his fertile memory and eloquent tongue could arm him; but he failed to pierce the secret of the change in her, and he abandoned in despair the effort to form her steps to Amyôt. He left her in anger and in reproach in the soft vapours of a sweet night of early spring, fragrant with the scent of opening fruit blossoms and of violets growing under the low dark clouds of rain. He was alarmed, afraid, and full of impotent anger and of unsatisfied wonder.
'Who has been with her? What has she heard?' he asked himself in vain, as he walked through the cold shadowy sweet-scented fields. His own heart was heavy with anxiety and disappointment. She was the last ambition of his life. For her his own youth, his own genius had seemed to live afresh, and ally themselves with the awaking forces of a coming time.
What some men feel in their children's promise he felt in hers.
He recognised in her the existence of great gifts, of uncommon powers, which would move the minds and the hearts of nations. That such things should be wrecked because the mere common useless sorrow of a human love held her soul captive and made her mouth dumb, seemed to the great artist the cruellest irony of fate, the crowning anomaly of all gods' grim jests.
Was Love ever, he thought bitterly, any better thing than the satire of success, the curse of genius, the ruin of imagination and of art?