by Ouida
She did not at all know her way, but she had thought if she kept along by the water she would some time or other surely get out of the sight of all those gay houses, which, shut as all their persiennes were, and invisible as were all their occupants, yet had fashion and frivolity so plainly written on their coquettish awnings, their balconies, their doorways, their red geraniums and golden calceolarias blazing before their blinds. At five o’clock there was nobody to trouble her certainly; yet within sight of all those windows she had felt as if she were still before the staring eyes and eyeglasses of the cruel crowd of that terrible yesterday.
She went on quickly with the elastic step which had been used to cover so easily mile after mile of the heathered moors of Bulmer, and the firm yellow sands by the northern ocean. Before the cloudless sun of the August daybreak was much above the waters of the east with the smoke of the first steamer from Havre towering grey and dark against the radiant rose of the sky, Vere had left Trouville, and its sleeping beauties and yawning dandies in their beds, far behind her, and was nearly a third of the way to Villerville. She did not know anything at all about Lecamus fils, Jules David, Challamel, and Figaro with his cabin, who had made Villerville famous, but she went onward because the sea was blue, the sand was yellow, the air was sweet and wholesome, and the solitude was complete.
Her spirits rose; light, and air, and liberty of movement were necessary to her, for, in the old woods and on the rough moors of Bulmer, her grandmother had let her roam as she chose, on foot or on her pony. It had been a stern rule in other things, but as regarded air and exercise she had enjoyed the most perfect freedom.
“Are you tired, Keziah?” she cried at last, noticing that the patient waiting-woman lagged behind. The stout Northumbrian admitted that she was. She had never been so in her life before; but that frightful sea journey from Southampton had left her stomach “orkard.”
Vere was touched to compunction.
“You poor creature! and I brought you out without your breakfast, and we have walked — oh! ever so many miles,” she said in poignant self-reproach. “Keziah, look here, there is a nice smooth stone. Sit down on it and rest, and I will run about. Yes; do not make any objection; sit down.”
Keziah, who adored her very shadow as it fell on sward or sand, demurred faintly, but the flesh was weak, and the good woman dropped down on the stone with a heavy thud, as of a sack falling to earth, and sat there in plaid shawl and homespun gown, with her hands on her knees, the homely sober figure that had seemed to Lady Dolly to have come out of the ark like the indigo bathing-dress.
Vere left her on that madreporic throne, and strayed onward herself along by the edge of the sea.
On one side of her was a dark bastion of rock, above that, out of sight, were green pastures and golden corn fields; on the other was the Channel, placid, sunny, very unlike the surging turbulent gigantic waves of her old home.
“Can you ever be rough? Can you ever look like salt water?” she said with a little contempt to it, not knowing anything about the appalling chopping seas and formidable swell of the Channel which the boldest mariners detest more than all the grand furies of Baltic or Atlantic. But it was bright blue water fretted with little curls of foam, and the low waves rolled up lazily, and lapped the sand at her feet; and she felt happy and playful, as was natural to her age; and that she was quite alone mattered nothing to her, for she had never had any young companions, and never played except with the dogs.
She wandered about, and ran here and there, and found some sandpipers’ empty nests, and gathered some gorse and stuck it in the riband of her old sailor’s hat, and was gay and careless, and sang little soft low songs to herself, as the swallows sing when they sit on the roof in mid-summer. She had taken off her hat, the wind lifted the weighty gold of her straight cut hair, and blew the old brown holland skirt away from her slender ankles. She began to look longingly at the water, spreading away from her so far and so far, and lying in delicious little cool shallows amongst the stones. She could not bathe, but she thought she might wade and paddle. She took off her shoes and stockings, and waded in. The rock pools were rather deep, and the water rose above her ankles; those pretty roses, and lilacs, and feathery hyacinths of the sea that science calls actiniae, uncurled their tufts of feathers, and spread out their starry crowns, and lifted their tiny bells around her; broad riband weeds floated, crabs waddled, little live shells sailed here and there, and all manner of algae, brown and red, were curling about the big stones. She was in paradise.
She had been reared on the edge of the sea — the cold dark stern sea of the north, indeed, but still the sea. This was only a quiet sunny nook of the French coast of the Channel, but it was charming from the silence, the sunshine, and the sweet liberty of the waters. She thought she was miles away from everyone, and therefore was duly obeying her mothers sole command. There was not even a sail in sight: quite far off was a cloud of dark boats, which were the fishing cobles of Honfleur; there was nothing else near, nothing but a score of gulls, spreading their white wings, and diving to catch the fish as they rose.
She waded on and on: filling an old creel with seaweeds and seashells, for she was no more than a child in a great many things. The anemones she would not take, because she had no means of keeping them in comfort. She contented herself with standing nearly knee-deep, and gazing down on all their glories seen through the glass of the still sparkling water. She sprang from stone to stone, from pool to pool, forgetting Keziah seated on her rock. Neither did she see a pretty little dingy that was fastened to a stake amongst the boulders.
The air was perfectly still; there was only one sound, that of the incoming tide running up and rippling over the pebbles.
Suddenly a voice from the waves, as it seemed, began to chaunt parts of the Requiem of Mozart. It was a voice pure as a larks, rich as an organ’s swell, tender as love’s first embrace, marvellously melodious, in a word, that rarity which the earth is seldom blessed enough to hear from more than one mortal throat in any century: it was a perfectly beautiful tenor voice.
Vere was standing in the water, struck dumb and motionless; her eyes dilated, she scarcely breathed, every fibre of her being, everything in her, body and soul, seemed to listen. She did not once wonder whence it came; the surpassing beauty and melody of it held her too entranced.
Whether it were in the air, in the water, in the sky, she never asked — one would have seemed as natural to her as the other.
From the Requiem it passed with scarce a pause to the impassioned songs of Gounods Romeo. Whatever the future may say of Gounod, this it will never be able to deny, that he is the supreme master of the utterances of Love. The passionate music rose into the air, bursting upon the silence and into the sunlight, and seeming to pierce the very heavens, then sinking low and sweet and soft as any lovers sigh of joy, breaking off at last abruptly and leaving nothing but the murmur of the sea.
The girl drew a great breathless cry, as if something beautiful were dead, and stood quite still, her figure mirrored in the shallows.
The singer came round from the projecting ledge of the brown cliffs, uncovered his head and bowed low, with apology for unwitting intrusion on her solitude.
It was he whom Adrienne had called le philtre d’amour.
Then the girl, who had been in heaven, dropped to earth; and remembered her wet and naked feet, and glanced down on them with shame, and coloured as rosy-red as the sea-flowers in the pool.
She threw an eager glance over the sands. Alas! she had forgotten her shoes and stockings, and the place where they had been knew them no more — the waves had rippled over them and were tossing them, heaven could tell how near or far away.
The “sad leaden humanity,” which drags us all to earth, brought her from the trance of ecstasy to the very humblest prose of shame and need.
“I have lost them,” she murmured; and then felt herself grow from rose to scarlet, as the singer stood on the other side of the pool gazing at her and seein
g her dilemma with amusement.
“Your shoes and stockings, mademoiselle?”
He was so used to seeing pretty nude feet at Trouville that it was impossible for him to measure the awful character of the calamity in the eyes of Vere.
“Yes, I took them off; and I never dreamt that anyone was here.”
“Perhaps you have only forgotten where you put them. Let me have the honour to look for your lost treasures.”
Vere stood in her shallow, amongst the riband weed, with her head hung down, and the colour burning in her face. All her pride, of which she had much, could not avail her here. She was nervously ashamed and unhappy.
The new-corner searched ardently and indefatigably, leaving no nook of rock or little deposit of sea-water unexamined. He waded in many places, and turned over the weed in all, but it was in vain. The sea was many an inch deeper over the shore than when she had first come, and her shoes and hose were doubtless drifting loose upon the waves: there was no trace of them.
Unconscious of this tragedy enacting, Keziah sat in the calm distance, a grey and brown figure, facing the horizon.
Vere stood all the while motionless; the sweet singing seeming still to throb and thrill through the air around, and the sunny daylight seeming to go round her in an amber mist through which she only saw her own two naked feet, still covered in some sort with the water and the weeds.
“They are gone, mademoiselle!” said the singer, coming to her with eyes that he made most tender and persuasive. They were beautiful eyes, that lent themselves with willingness to this familiar office.
“They must have been washed away by the tide; it is coming higher each moment. Indeed, you must not remain where you are or you will be surrounded very soon, and carried off yourself. These channel tides are treacherous and uncertain.”
“I will go to my maid,” murmured Vere, with a fawn-like spring from her stones to others, forgetting in her shame to even thank him for his services.
“To that admirable person enthroned yonder?” said the singer of the songs. “But, mademoiselle, there is the deep sea between you and her already. Look!”
Indeed, so rapidly had the tide run in, and the waters swelled up, that she was divided from her attendant by a broad sheet of blue shallows. Keziah, tired and sleepy from her journeyings, was nodding unconsciously on her throne of rocks.
“And she will be drowned!” said Vere with a piercing cry, and she began wading knee-deep into the sea before her companion knew what she was about. In a moment he had caught her and lifted her back on to the firm sand.
“Your good woman is in no danger, but you cannot reach her so, and you will only risk your own life, mademoiselle,” he said gently. “There is nothing to be alarmed about. Shout to your attendant to take the path up the cliffs — perhaps she would not understand me — and we will take this road; so we shall meet on the top of this tableland that is now above our heads. That is all. Shout loudly to her.”
Vere was trembling, but she obeyed — she had learned the too oft-forgotten art of obedience at Bulmer Chase, and she shouted loudly till she aroused Keziah who awoke, rubbing her eyes, and dreaming, no doubt, that she was in the servants’ hall at Bulmer.
When she understood what had happened and what she was bidden to do, the stout north country-woman tucked up her petticoats, and began to climb up the steep path with a will, once assured that her young mistress was out of all danger. The face of the cliff soon hid her figure from sight, and Vere felt her heart sink strangely.
But she had no time to reflect, for the stranger propelled her gently towards the worn ridge in the rocks near them, a path which the fisher-people had made in coming up and down.
“Let us mount quickly, mademoiselle. I did not notice myself that the tide was so high. Alas! I fear the rocks will hurt your feet. When we reach the first ledge you must wind some grass round them. Come!”
Vere began to climb. The stones, and the sand, and the rough dry weeds cut her feet terribly, but these did not hurt her so much as the idea that he saw her without shoes and stockings. Reaching a ledge of stone he bade her sit down, and tore up some broad grasses and brought them to her.
“Bind these about your feet,” he said kindly, and turned his back to her. “Ah! why will you mind so much? Madame, your lovely mother, dances about so for two or three hours in the water-carnival every noonday!”
“Do you know my mother?” said Vere, lifting her face, very hot and troubled from winding the grass about her soles and insteps.
“I have had that honour for many years in Paris. You will have heard of me, perhaps. I am a singer.”
Vere, for the first time, looked in his face, and saw that it was the face whose beauty had attracted her in the sunlight on the shore, and whom Adrienne had called the philtre d’amour.
“It was you who were singing, then?” she said timidly, and thinking how beautiful and how wonderful he was, this great artist, who stood before her clothed in white, with the sun shining in his luminous eyes.
“Yes. I came here to bathe and to swim, and then run over some of the scores of a new opera, that we shall have in Paris this winter, of Ambroise Thomas’s. One cannot study in peace for ten minutes in Trouville. You love music, mademoiselle? Oh! you need not speak: one always knows.”
“I never went to any opera,” said Vere under her breath, resuming her climb up the rock.
“Never! May I sing to you then in the first opera you hear! Take care; this path is steep. Do not look back; and catch at the piles where the guindeaux hang. You need fear nothing. I am behind you.”
Vere climbed on in silence; the thick bands of grass protected her feet in a measure, yet, it was hard and rough work. Young and strong though she was, she was glad when they reached the short grass on the head of the cliffs and sank down on it, field-fares and several birds of all kinds wheeling about her in the grey clear air.
“You are not faint?” he asked anxiously.
“Oh no! Only tired.”
“Will you rest here ten minutes, and I will come back to you?”
“If you wish me.”
He smiled at the childish docility of the answer and left her, whilst she leaned down on the turf of the table-land, and gazed at the sea far down below, and at the horizon where many a white sail shone, and here and there streamed the dark trail of a steamer’s smoke. She had forgotten Keziah for the moment; she was only hearing in memory those wonderful tones, clear as a lark’s song, rich as an organs swell, ringing over the waters in the silence.
In less than ten minutes he was back at her side with a pair of little new wooden shoes in his hand.
“I thought these might save you from the stones and dust a little, Mademoiselle Herbert,” he said, “and it is impossible to procure any better kind in this village. Will you try them?”
She was grateful; the little shoes were a child’s size and fitted as if they had been the glass slipper of Cinderella.
“You are very good,” she said timidly. “And how can you tell what my name is?”
“I witnessed your arrival yesterday. Besides, who has not heard of lovely Madame Dolly’s daughter?”
Vere was silent. She vaguely wondered why her mother was called Dolly by all men whatever.
Suddenly, with a pang of conscience, she remembered Keziah, and sprang up on her sabots. Corrèze divined her impulse and her thought.
“Your good woman is quite safe,” he said; “the peasants have seen her on the top of the rocks, but she seems to have taken a wrong path, and so it may be half-an-hour before we overtake her. But do not be afraid or anxious. I will see you safely homeward.”
Vere grew very pale. “But mother made me promise to see no one.”
“Why?”
“Because my dress is all wrong. And poor Keziah! — oh, how frightened she will be!”
“Not very. We shall soon overtake her. Or, better still, I will send a lad after her while we rest a little. Come and see my village, if you can walk in you
r sabots. It is a village that I have discovered, so I have the rights of Selkirk. Come, if you are not too tired. Brava!”
He cried “brava!” because she walked so well in her wooden shoes; and he saw that to please him she was overcoming the timidity which the solitude of her situation awoke in her.
“How can she be the daughter of that little impudent fine mouche?” he thought.
Vere was shy but brave. Lady Dolly and her sisterhood were audacious but cowardly.
He led her across the broad hard head of the cliffs, mottled black and grey where the rock broke through the grass, and thence across a sort of rambling down with low furze-bushes growing on it, further by a cart-track, where cart-wheels had cut deep into the soil, to a little cluster of houses, lying sheltered from the sea winds by the broad bluff of the cliffs which rose above them, and gathered under the shelter of apple and cherry trees, with one great walnut growing in the midst.
It was a poor little village enough, with a smell of tar from the fishing-nets and sails spread out to dry, and shingle roofs held down with stones, and little dusky close-shut pigeon-holes for windows: but, in the memory of Vere for ever afterwards, that little village seemed even as Arcadia.
He had two wooden chairs brought out, and a wooden table, and set them under the cherry-trees, all reddened then with fruit. He had a wooden bowl of milk, and honey, and brown bread, and cherries, brought out too. There were lavender and a few homely stocks and wallflowers growing in the poor soil about the fences of the houses; bees hummed and swallows cleft the air.
“You are thirsty and hungry, I am sure,” he said, and Vere, who had not learned to be ashamed of such things, said with a smile, “I am.”