CHAPTER L.
Damaris remained unmoved by the departure of her old friend—almost unconscious of it. His words had drifted by her ear, bringing little meaning, and no conviction. He spoke as an artist, as a man, as experience and the world suggested to him; but his arguments could avail nothing against the instincts of her own heart and the horror which the charges and the offer of Blanche de Laon had left upon the ignorance and innocence of her mind. What would have been as nothing to one who had dwelt in the world, to which evil is familiar and disgrace immaterial if of profit, was of an overwhelming disgust and terror to a child whose brain was nurtured on the high unworldly chivalries of the great poets, and who had dwelt in a solitude of imaginative meditation amongst the solitudes of nature, amongst the simple and noble lessons of 'the world as it is God's.'
She passed the whole day in a kind of trance. She ate nothing; she drank water thirstily. She scarcely replied to the questions of the woman of the house. The night went by, bringing her no sleep, no dreams; she was in that kind of agony which nothing except youth, in all its exaggeration, its magnificent follies, and its pathetic ignorance, can suffer. At daybreak she went out with her companions, the dogs, and roamed half unconsciously and quite aimlessly over the pastures which in the days of Port Royal had been trodden by so many restless feet, along the margin of the little stream which had heard the sigh of so many a world-wearied heart.
The morning was clear and cold and very still. Far away where Paris lay there was a dusky, heavy cloud. By noon her mind was made up.
A great and heroic impulse came upon her, born out of the innocence of her soul and the infinitude of her gratitude.
With its instinct of self-negation and noble efforts moving impetuously in her as the warm sap moves in the young vines, she took no time to reflect, sought no word of counsel. She covered herself in her great red-lined cloak, and took her well-known way once more across the pastures, bidding the woman of the house keep the dogs within.
The movement of walking, the coolness of the wind, the scent of air full of all the promise of the spring, renewed the health and youth in her, gave her courage and exaltation and force. Her dual nature, with its homely rustic strength and its patrician pride, its peasant's stubbornness and its poet's illusions, moved her by dual motives, dual instincts, on the path she took. To do something for him, however slight, to try and move for him that only soul which had the power to please his own, to prove that she was not vile or mean or basely counting on personal gains or personal glories—this seemed the only thing that life had left her to do.
All her innocent ambitions were dead; the career of which she had dreamed with delight now seemed to her only loathsome. Rosselin had said aright: she was half a child and half a poet, and with the rude primitive faiths of a peasant she had the unworldly and unreal imaginations of a student of imaginative things. All the stubbornness and the simplicity of rustic life, and all the idealisation and unwisdom of a romantic mind were blended in her; and to both of these the accusations and the invitations of Blanche de Laon seemed as hideous as crime. The world could hold no laurels and no treasures she would ever care for now. Were she to reach fame what would the world think? Only that, as that woman had said, she had loved him and had used him to make of him a ladder of gold to a throne of power.
He himself, even, would think so.