Othmar

by Ouida

He himself might come one day to believe her sorrows and her hunger, her sickness and her loneliness, all parts of some mere drama studied and played to touch his pity and to win his aid.

The thought was sickening to her: sooner than let such suspicion lie on her, she felt that she would seek death as Yseulte de Valogne had sought it. They would believe then, she thought.

She walked on over the fields, past the grazing sheep, and along the stream where Pascal had mused and Racine dreamed; and with the rapid resolute movements of a mind strung up to some great action and committed to some course accepted past recall, she reached the station of Trappes and took her way to Paris.

She had gone on that road so many a time with Rosselin that it seemed to her she could have gone blindfolded along it.

She sat motionless and unconscious of anything around her as the train went on to Paris; her clothes were dark, her face was covered. She reached the Boulevard Montparnasse and mingled unnoticed with the crowd, though twice or thrice men looked after her, attracted by the supple elastic freedom of her walk, which had in it all the ease and vigour of movement which had come to her in those happy days of childhood when she had raced over the sands with the goats, and leaped from rock to rock, and sprung into the waves with headlong joyous greeting of the sea as her best comrade.

She remained an open-air creature, a daughter of the winds and the waters, of the sun and the dew; and all the exigencies of life in the streets and the constraint of movement in a city could not take from her that liberty of movement, as of the circling sea-gull, as of the cloud-born swallow.

She took her way straight to the house of Othmar, to the house which had sheltered her in her sickness and need. Many times as she had been in Paris she had never seen its portals since she had been carried through them to go to Les Hameaux. It stood before her now in the sunshine; the vast pile behind its gates and rails of gilded bronze, which Stefan Othmar had purchased in the days of Louis Philippe from a great noble, compromised and exiled for the Duchesse de Berri. The Suisse in his gorgeous uniform was standing in the grand entrance; liveried servants were going to and fro, through the archways of the courtyard there was a glimpse of the green gardens and the shining fountains. The sight of it all gave her a strange sense of her own utter distance from him.

She remembered how she had said to him, 'Is this house hers?' and how he had answered, 'Surely, my dear, what is mine is hers,' and of how then she had longed to rise and go out, homeless and friendless as she was, and die in the streets rather than stay under that roof. Standing there now, a lonely, dusty, obscure figure before that lordly palace, she suddenly realised how utterly apart she was from him, how eternally she would be nothing in his life. She had been sheltered there for a few weeks in charity, that was all. He was the whole world to her, but she was no more than a passing compassion to him. All the pomp and pageantry and power of his material existence oppressed her, symbolised as it was in this great palace, with its hurrying servants, its liveried guards, its waiting equipages, its stately gardens: whilst the knowledge she had of the thwarted affections, and emptiness of heart, and vain desires, which haunted him, master of so much though he was, filled her with an agony of longing to be able to give him that simple herb of sweet content which will so rarely blossom in the gardens of the great, in the orchid houses of the rich man.

She stood in the sunlight which shone and glittered on the gilded gates, a dark and lonely figure so motionless and still that the concierge spoke to her roughly, bidding her not stand so near. At that moment through the gateways there came the Russian equipage of the mistress of the house; the three black horses were rearing and plunging, their silver chains glistening, their bells chiming; amongst the cushions of the carriage Nadine reclined. Her face was very pale, her expression very cold; she was about to pay her ceremonious visit of welcome to the Princess Lobow Gregorievna.

Full of the purpose which had driven her thither, and not wholly conscious of what she did, Damaris stretched her hands out and caught at the sable skins of the carriage rug as the wheels passed her.