'Listen to me for one moment more. You are an aristocrat and I am nothing; I had only some little talent and that is dead in me; you will live beside him all the days of your life, and I shall never, perhaps, see his face again. Believe what I say as though I were dying. You are all that he thinks of on earth, and he is tired, and chilled, and empty of heart because you have never cared for him as he cared. I shall go where I shall never trouble you, and if ever he think of me it will be only with pity just for one passing moment. Will you remember only this, that I have come to beg of you to make him happier, to make his dreams true—it is only you who can do it. You have his heart in your hands; do not throw it against a stone wall, cold and hard, as they throw a bird to kill it. You are a great lady, and the world is with you, and you have many lovers and courtiers, they say, but what will it profit you, all of it, if one day he looks at you and you know that he thinks of you no more because you, yourself, have killed his soul in him?'
'I am flattered that Count Othmar has made me the subject of his discourse with you!'
Damaris perceived the fault she had committed, the offence she had excited. Resolute to follow out the purpose which had brought her there, she drained the cup of bitterness which she had voluntarily taken up to the last drop.
'He hardly ever spoke of you,' she said. 'But I think he wished me to know that all his thoughts and memories were yours, so that I should not ever—ever—be misled to dream that they were mine. I have seen him seldom; very seldom; only once this year; but that once he did speak of you, and I knew that all his life was in your hands, and that he thinks you do not care——'
The words were simple, and not wisely chosen, and spoken out of the fulness of her heart, but they carried a sense of their sincerity to the sceptical ear of their auditor. Almost for the moment she believed that they were truth. A sense of compassion touched her.
This girl, so young, so ignorant, so hopelessly devoted to a man who could be nothing to her, seemed to her childish, melodramatic, plebeian, absurd; and yet had a certain nobility and force, and pathos, and mystery in her which stirred to pity this heart which had never known pity. She had been only a peasant, born and reared amongst the rude toilers of the sea and of the soil; what fault was it of hers if she had given away her life to the first man who had been kind to her, and in whom she saw the charm of gentleness, the grace of culture? The infinite comprehension which she herself possessed of all the frailties and all the errors of human nature, almost supplied in her the place of sympathy. She did not pity because she disdained so much; but she understood, and that power of understanding made her in a manner indulgent, though indulgent with contempt.
But the memory of things which seemed to her damning witnesses of fact rose to her thoughts, and checked as it arose the softer and more intelligent impulse which for awhile had held her passive.
She repulsed Damaris coldly, drawing once more her skirts from her touch.