by Ouida
‘There has been no one here so long,’ she said yet again with pathetic appeal in her voice. ‘I thought I did no harm; M. Duvelleroy, the head gardener, has always let me come when there is a feast day. Indeed, I have never taken the rare flowers, only those which he did not want. It is the parish church of S. Pharamond, too; I did not know I did wrong — pray do not blame the gardeners.’
‘Blame them, when I am so much their debtor! I wish you would believe that you are the queen of all the gardens here. Why, even still you are hesitating to pluck the camellias!’
‘Because they told me never to touch them; I only looked at them; I think M. Duvelleroy sends them to Nice to sell. Indeed — indeed — I have never taken but what he told me I might have.’
What seemed so very terrible to her was that she must appear to the owner of S. Pharamond as a thief of his flowers! A vague idea flashed across her mind, that perhaps she might pay for the value of them — but then she had no money! The old jewels of her mother were to be hers, indeed; but when? She had not even seen them since her grandmother had died; perhaps they were to be sold to defray the cost of her entrance into convent life; she did not know. The great trouble of her spirit was reflected in her face, which was full of conflicting emotions; her mouth, which had been too silent the night before, trembled a little; the tears gleamed under her long lashes. Othmar thought her much more interesting with all this expression breaking up from under the mask of white marble which the convent had made her wear. In her bewilderment she became altogether a child; and the stately quiet of her manner fell away from her like an embroidered ermine-lined robe too heavy for her years.
‘Do they sell my camellias — the rogues?’ he said with a smile. ‘Of course you shall go away if you will, but not empty-handed. There must be something better worth having than those frost-bitten roses.’
He called a man who was sweeping up leaves on a lawn here.
‘Go and tell your chief to cut his finest orchids and bring them in a basket to me himself: any other rare thing he may have in the houses he can cut also. Mademoiselle,’ he said, turning to the girl, ‘you must not go back to Millo with such a poor opinion of my gardens. Is the Duchesse well? You remember that I had the honour to be presented to you by her last evening?’
‘You are Count Othmar?’
‘Men call me so,’ he replied, for he never loved that title which seemed to him so contemptible a thing, given, as it had been, in the beginning of the century by the first Emperor. ‘I am happy to be the owner of S. Pharamond, since you deign to visit it. You are at Millo every winter, I think?’
‘I am; they are not,’ she said, regaining her composure a little. ‘I did not hear your name last night. I thought you were some gentleman from Paris.’
‘I live oftenest in Paris,’ he replied, ‘but at the present moment I come from Central Asia. I am a friend of Monsignore Melville, as I told you; and I hope you will believe me when I say that, if only for his regard for you, you would be welcome at S. Pharamond.’
He spoke without compliment, seeing that any compliment would only scare her more.
‘You help my parish church, did you say?’ he continued. ‘It is very disgraceful of me never to have known it; we will get Melville to come and preach there. Does the curé want for anything? — is there nothing I could do?’
‘He wants a new soutane very much,’ she said with hesitation.
‘Then a new soutane he shall have before the world is a week older,’ said Othmar. ‘Why will you go away? Are you too afraid of me to venture into the house? Would you not have some cream, some cakes, some strawberries? What do young Graces like you live upon? Command anything you will.’
‘I have had some bread and milk; I want nothing; you are very kind.’
‘If you think me so, you must not treat me so distantly. You must make me a friend of yours. The Duchesse herself presented me last night. You seem determined to forget that.’
She stood inclined to go away, unwilling to seem ungrateful, yet afraid to remain; a charming picture of confusion and indecision, mingled with a gravity and a grace beyond her years. The Greuze face which he had seen in the boat bore the full force of the morning light as a rose bears it, the pure tints only deepened and illumined by it. Under the straight simple lines of the grey stuff gown the budding beauties of a still childish form could be divined; in her embarrassment her colour still came and went; her large eyes, of a golden hazel, were almost black from the shadow of their lashes. So far as a man whose heart and senses are engrossed by one woman can be alive to the loveliness of another, Othmar was sensible of this youthful and poetic beauty, which seemed to belong to the first fresh hours of the morning, and to be born of it as the rosebuds were.
‘I hope you will not be angry,’ she said anxiously. ‘It was my fault. At Millo no one must touch a single flower, and the curé likes to see the altar pretty, and so one day — oh, that is quite a long time ago, three winters ago — I happened to see the gate open into these grounds, and I asked M. Henri if I might gather what he did not care to sell, and he said that I was welcome always to the common flowers. You will not blame him, if you please, for it was altogether my fault.’
She had seldom made a speech so long in her life, and she paused, ashamed of the sound of her voice in the quiet of the morning air. She feared also that she was doing wrong to speak at all to this stranger, all owner of S. Pharamond though he might be.
‘All that I am inclined to blame him for,’ answered Othmar, ’is for having laid any restrictions upon you; he has no right to sell even a sprig of mignonette. These gardens are not kept for profit; they can have no happier use than to contribute to your pleasure and to the altars of the church. Pray, do not go; wait a moment for this criminal to bring us the orchids.’
But she only grew more alarmed at her own intrusion there. The easy, kindly gallantry of his manner scarcely reassured her; she was but a child, and a child reared in formal and severe codes. She doubted that she was guilty of some grave offence in standing under a palm-tree beside a group of camellias with a person whom she had scarcely seen before. She had neither the habits of the world nor the conventional badinage which could have met his courtesy on its own ground and replied to it in a few careless phrases. But it seemed to him that her silence was golden, as golden as the gleams in her changeful hazel eyes as the sun smote on them.
‘If you would allow me to go,’ she murmured, ‘I have quite enough flowers here. It is such a small church, and the orchids would be much too rare — —’
‘If the orchids were made of rubies and pearls, what happier fate could they ask than to fall from your hands on to the altars of the Madonna?’ said Othmar, as he broke off the blossoms of his camellias with no sparing hand.
At that moment the head-gardener, alarmed and disturbed at the message which he had received from his master, came in sight with a basket hurriedly filled with some of the choicest treasures of his forcing-houses.
Othmar took it from him:
‘You did quite right,’ he said in a low tone, ‘to make my friends welcome to the gardens in my absence, but another time, M. Duvelleroy, make them welcome to the best; do not reserve it for the markets and the florist shops of Nice.’
The man, guilty, and taken at a disadvantage, had no time to prepare a lie; he grew red, and stammered, and was thankful for his master’s gesture of dismissal as Othmar turned from him impatiently and offered the orchids to the girl.
‘You are angry with him,’ she said, anxiety conquering her timidity.
‘Not so; I am grateful to him,’ said Othmar. ‘But I shall, perhaps, be angry with my house-steward, whose duty it is to keep these rogues clean-handed. If he had given you his best flowers I would have pensioned him for life, but to limit you to taking what he did not want to sell, was to disgrace S. Pharamond.’
‘Indeed, he has been very kind all these three winters,’ she murmured, in infinite distress at the thought that she had inadvertent
ly injured the man in his master’s opinion.
‘He shall wear the order of St. Fiacre if you like, if there be such an order to reward good gardeners,’ said Othmar gaily, seeing her genuine anxiety on the man’s behalf. ‘I may come and see your decorations to-morrow. Shall I send you a load of flowers? That would be better I think.’
She looked alarmed.
‘Oh no; oh pray, do not!’ she said with earnestness. ‘You are very kind to think of it, Monsieur, but it would frighten the curé, and we should not know what to do with so many, the church is so very small — —’
She hesitated a moment, the colour in her cheeks grew warm as she added:
‘My cousin does not know that I come here. I do not mean that it is any secret, but she might think it wrong, intrusive, impertinent — —’
‘She could think nothing of the sort,’ said Othmar. ‘They are three words which no one could associate with Mdlle. de Valogne; I am delighted my deserted house could be so honoured. Must you go? I shall not easily forgive myself if I frighten you away. Let me come with you to the gate at least.’
He walked beside her under the palms and on the shaven grass down an aisle of clipped arbutus, carrying for her the camellias, white and rose, which he had broken off their plants with no care for the appearance of the group to which they belonged.
She was silent; she was subdued by an unwonted sense of wrong-doing; she fancied that she had committed some terrible indiscretion; but how was she to have known that he was there, when for three winters the camellias had blossomed unseen in those silent evergreen ways, which no step but a gardener’s had ever disturbed, and where she had come to watch the blackbirds trip over the fallen leaves, and the fountains dance in the sunshine, and the tea-roses shower petals of cream and of gold on the terraces, with no more thought or hesitation than she had gone to the olive-yards of Nicole Sandros? Her confusion had nothing of awkwardness. It was very graceful, almost stately, in its silence; it was the grave innocence, the startled hesitation, of the young nymph surprised in the sanctuary of the grove.
She accepted the orchids with a serious gratitude, which seemed to him quite out of proportion to the slenderness of the gift; but when he said as much she interrupted him:
‘They are so beautiful,’ she said earnestly. ‘It seems cruel to have plucked them. One fancies they will take wing like the butterflies.’
‘You are very fond of flowers?’
‘Oh yes — and people waste them so. At my cousin’s ball last week there were five thousand roses. I saw them in the morning; they were quite dead.’
‘Did you not see them at night?’
‘At night, no; how could I? I am not in the world; I never shall be. Sometimes they tell me to be an hour in the reception-rooms after dinner; that is all; I do not care for it.’
‘But do you not wish for the time of balls to come? Every young girl does.’
‘I try never to think about it,’ she said simply. ‘I know it will never come for me.’
There was a resignation in her words which was more pathetic than any regrets.
Then with the colour hot in her cheeks again, remembering that she was speaking too much to a stranger, she opened the little gate in the arbutus walk which led into the grounds of Millo. ‘I thank you very much,’ she murmured. ‘I assure you I will never come again.’
‘And unless you come again, I assure you that you will tell me tacitly that I have had the misfortune to displease you,’ said Othmar, as he held open the gate, and bowed low to her; he saw that it would be only unkindness to detain her or to accompany her. She was as uneasy as a bird which has flown by mistake into a conservatory.
‘I will come to the church to-morrow,’ he added. ‘Do you not sing there sometimes?’
‘Now and then. There is no one else to sing. But my cousin does not approve of it. She thinks there may be people over from Nice; but there never are. There is no one but the peasants.’
‘The Duchesse will not mind me,’ said Othmar. ‘Let us say au revoir!’
He kissed her hand with a careless gallantry which made her colour over her brow and throat, and let her leave him. She sped like a frightened fawn over the turf and was soon lost to sight in the bosquets of Millo.
Othmar strolled back to the house.
‘Au tombeau seul finit ma voie obscure,’
he repeated to himself as he looked after her; the pathos of her destiny gave her a spirituality and a sanctity in his sight, and the song of the blind child and its young singer for a few moments disputed a place in his memory with the vision of Nadine Napraxine as she had plucked the tea-roses on his terrace to let them fall.
‘That young girl would not let a rose fade,’ he thought, ‘and her own roses are to wither between convent walls! What arbitrary caprices has Fate! If they would only let me give her a million — —’
But they would not even have let him give her orchids and camellias had they known it.
CHAPTER IX.
Othmar went into his house, but before taking his coffee sent for his steward, and gave him a brief but severe reprimand for having permitted Duvelleroy and his underlings to use the gardens as a nursery-ground.
‘The grounds may be sacked to please my friends,’ he said, in conclusion. ‘But if a single carnation be sold for a single centime, it is not the seller who will be dismissed, but yourself, who are paid highly only that you may save your subordinates from those temptations which kill honesty and should be no more left in the path of poor men than poisoned mangolds in a sheep-field.’
The notion that his hothouses and gardens had furnished the flower-sellers of Nice with materials for their myriads of bouquets, irritated him disproportionately. He would have taken his oath that on none of his estates did his people steal a farthing’s worth. They were all highly paid, and those set in authority over them were all men who had been chosen and enriched by his father; he had often spoken of their probity and affection with pride; and now they cheated him for sake of selling a bouquet!
It was a mere trifle, no doubt. He would have cleared his gardens at a stroke to please anyone he liked; and he would have given a poor man willingly the value of all his forcing houses; but the knowledge that his hirelings sold his mignonette and his heliotrope to profit themselves irritated him, and even quite embittered life to him for the moment. The most generous minds feel the most acutely betrayal in small things, and resent most vividly the contemptible robberies which take advantage of trust and opportunity. That the rich man is so seldom honestly served goes further, perhaps, to redress the balance between him and the poor man than the latter, in his ignorance, ever supposes.
‘After all,’ he thought, ‘perhaps I only feed rogues, like Napraxine.’ And the thought was painful to him, for he fed them well.
It was primarily his own fault for so seldom coming to the place; perhaps it was natural that when years rolled on and they never saw their master they should learn to consider his possessions as almost their own. But he had so many places that he could not live in them all. His fathers had bought them, so, out of respect to their memories, he could not get rid of them. He had a great house on the Boulevard St. Germain; another great house in Piccadilly; another in the Teresian Platz of Vienna; he had estates in France, England, Germany, and Austria, a Scotch moor, a Flemish forest, a château on the shores of the Dalmatian Adriatic, a villa at Biarritz, a castle in dense woods on the Moselle, and whole towns, villages, plains, and hills in Croatia itself. How was he to live at all these places? He lent them liberally, but he could hardly sell them; the head of the house of Othmar could not sell what he had inherited. If he had sold them he would only have had more millions with which he would not have known what to do.
When he had drunk a cup of coffee and a glass of iced water, he went for a long ride, mounting high up into the hills until the sea lay far below, blue as a great bed of mysotis, and the gilded cupolas of La Jacquemerille glittered in his sight far beneath the darkening slope
s of pine. When he returned to his one o’clock breakfast, he found that his house was deserted no more. He was told that his uncle, the Baron Friederich, had arrived by the rapide from Paris. He was not greatly pleased, but he prepared to do his duties as a host without betraying his sense that the new comer was not precisely in harmony with a romantic retreat amidst myrtles, camellias, and bromelias.
But he also foresaw a tedious day and evening, and he did not care to have the keen blue eyes of his father’s brother fixed on him at a moment when he was sending telegrams in all directions and commanding all kinds of novel diversions to amuse and receive the Princess Napraxine.
‘Have your travels tended to convince you that Europeans are wrong not to let the tails of sheep fatten and appear at their tables?’ said his unbidden guest, coming out of the house as though they had parted the previous night instead of twenty months before.
There was no figure better known in Paris than that of the Baron Friederich Othmar, familiar to society all over Europe as Baron Fritz; a tall and portly figure carried with the ease and vigour of manhood, though age had whitened the hair, that was still abundant, on the handsome head above. He never attempted to conceal his age: he despised all maquillage, as all healthy and all clever men do; and if his skin was as fair and his hands were as white and soft as a duchess’s, it was because nature had made them so, and a life temperate in indulgence though entirely unscrupulous in morals had preserved his health and his strength unimpaired save by occasional twinges of the gout. With old Gaulois blood in him, Friederich Othmar was a thorough Parisian in habit, taste, and manner; but he was a true Slav in suppleness, sagacity, and profound secretiveness. Othmar thought that there was not on the face of the earth another man with such a hideous power of dissimulation as his uncle; whilst the elder man, on the contrary, looked upon such dissimulation as the mere mark which distinguishes the civilised being from the savage. ‘Dissimulation lies at the root of all good manners,’ he was wont to say in moments of frankness. ‘Your friend bores you infinitely; you smile, and appear charmed! If you do not, you are a boor. Dissimulation is the essence of Christianity; you are enjoined to turn one cheek after another, and not to show that you smart. Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities, the world would be a bear-garden.’