by Ouida
The Duc de Béthune was one of those conquests which flattered even her sated and fastidious vanity; and she had been touched to unwonted feeling by the delicate, chivalrous, and lofty character of the loyalty he gave her so long.
She jested at him often, but she respected him always; occasionally she irritated Othmar by saying to him, half in joke and half in earnest:
‘Sometimes I almost wish that I had married Béthune!’
That he remained unmarried for her sake was always agreeable to her.
Loris Loswa was, on the contrary, one of the gayest of her many servitors. By birth noble and poor, he had been early compromised in a students’ revolt at Kieff, and through family influence had been allowed self-exile instead of deportation to Tobolsk. He had turned his steps to Paris, and, possessing great facility for art, had pursued the study seriously and so successfully, that before he was thirty he had become one of the most noted artists in France.
He had a wonderful talent for the portraiture of women. No one rendered with so much grace, so much charm, so much delicate flattery, running deftly in the lines of truth, the peculiar beauties of the mondaine, in which, however much nude nature may have done, art always does still more. All that subtle, indescribable loveliness of the woman of society, which is made up of so many details of tint and costume, and manner and style, and a thousand other subtle indescribable things, was caught and fixed by the brush or by the crayon of Loris Loswa with a power all his own, and a fidelity which became the most charming of compliments. Ruder artists, truer perhaps to art than he, grumbled at his method and despised his renown. ‘Faiseur de chiffons’ some students wrote once upon his door; and there were many of his brethren who pretended that his creations were nothing more than audacious, and unreally brilliant, trickeries.
But detraction did not lock the wheels of his triumphal chariot; it glided along with inconceivable rapidity through the pleasant avenues of popular admiration. And his art pleased too many connoisseurs of elegant taste and cultured sight not to have in it some higher and finer qualities than his enemies allowed to it. He had magical colouring, and as magical a touch; a woman’s portrait, under his treatment, became gorgeous as a sunbird, delicate as an orchid, ethereal as a butterfly floating down a sunbeam. Then he was at times arrogant in his pretensions, fastidious in his selections of sitters; he was given to call himself an amateur, which at once disarmed his critics and increased his vogue; he was an aristocrat, and very good-looking, which did not diminish his popularity with any class of women; and what increased it still more was, that he refused many more sitters than he accepted. Not to have been painted in water colours, or drawn in pastel by Count Loris Loswa, was to any élégante to be a step behindhand in fashion; to have a pearl missing from her crown of distinction.
‘If anyone could paint dew on a cobweb it would be Loswa,’ a great critic had said one day. ‘Have you never seen dew on a cobweb? It is the most beautiful thing in the world, especially when a sunbeam trembles through it.’
His present hostess had a high opinion of his powers, mingled with a certain depreciation of them. ‘Perhaps it is only a trick,’ she admitted; ‘but it is a divine trick — a trick of Hermes.’
He leaned now over the balustrade of the terrace of St. Pharamond, the warmth of the western sun shining on his fair curls and straight profile.
‘A coxcomb can never be a genius,’ murmured the Duc de Béthune, glancing towards him with sovereign contempt and dislike.
‘You are always very porté against poor Loris,’ returned his hostess with a smile. ‘Yes, he has genius in a way, the same sort of genius that Watteau had, and Coustou and Boucher; he should have been born under Louis Quinze; that is his only mistake.’
‘He is a coxcomb,’ repeated Béthune.
‘He seems so to you, because all your life has been filled with grave thoughts and strong actions. All artists are apt to seem mere triflers to all soldiers. Who is that girl he is looking at? — what a handsome face!’
She raised herself a little on her elbow, and looked down over the balustrade; a small boat with a single red sail and two women under it were passing under the terrace; one of them was old, brown and ugly, the other was young, fair, and with golden-brown hair curling under a red woollen fisher’s cap. The water was shallow under the marble walls of St. Pharamond; the boat was drifting very slowly; there was a pile of oranges and lemons in it as its cargo; the elder woman, with one oar in the water, was with her other hand counting copper coins into a leathern bag in her lap; the younger, who steered with a string tied to her foot, was managing the sail with a practised skill which showed that all maritime exercises were familiar to her. When she sat down again she looked up at the terrace above her.
She had a beautiful and uncommon countenance, full of light; the light of youth, of health, of enjoyment; she wore a gown of rough dark-blue sea-stuff much stained with salt water, and the sleeves of it were rolled up high, showing the whole of her bare and admirably moulded arms. The memories of Melville and of his hostess both went back to the day when they had seen another boat upon those waters with the happy loveliness of youth within it.
Loris Loswa, full of outspoken admiration, exhausted all his epithets of praise as he watched the little vessel drift by them, slowly, very slowly, for there was no wind to aid it, and the oar was motionless in the water.
‘Stay, oh stay!’ he cried to the boat, and began to murmur the ‘Enfant, si j’étais roi — —’
‘If you were a king you could hardly do better than what, I am quite sure, you will do as it is,’ said Nadine. ‘Find out where she lives, and make her portrait for next year’s Salon. She is very handsome, and that old scarlet cap is charming. Let us recompense her for passing, and astonish her.’
As she spoke she drew a massive gold bracelet off her own arm, and leaning farther down over the marble parapet, threw it towards the girl. Her aim was good; the boat was almost motionless, the bracelet was very weighty; it fell with admirable precision where it was intended to fall — on the knees of the girl as she sat in the prow behind the pile of golden fruit.
‘How astonished and pleased she will be!’ said Loswa. ‘It is only you, Madame, who have such apropos inspirations.’
Even as he spoke the maiden in the boat had taken up the bracelet, looked at it a moment with a frown upon her face, then without a second’s pause had sprung to her feet to obtain a better attitude for her effort, and with a magnificent sweep of her bare arm upward and backward cast the thing back again on high on to the balustrade, where it rolled to the feet of its mistress.
Without waiting an instant, she plucked the oars up, one from the hand of the old woman the other from the bottom of the boat, and with vigorous strokes drove her sluggish old vessel past the terrace wall, never once looking up, and not heeding the cries of her companion. In a few moments, under her fierce swift movements, the boat was several yards away, leaving the shallow water for the deeper, and hidden altogether from the gaze of her admirers by the red sail flaked with amber and bistre stains, where wind, and sun, and storm had marked it for their own.
‘What has happened?’ said Melville, who had not understood the episode of the bracelet, rising and coming towards them.
‘We are in Arcadia, Monsignor!’ cried Nadine. ‘A peasant girl rejects a jewel!’
‘Is she a peasant? I should doubt it,’ said Béthune.
Melville looked through one of the spy-glasses.
‘No, no! It is Damaris Bérarde,’ he said as he laid it aside. ‘She is by no means a peasant. She is a great heiress in her own little way, and as proud as if she were dauphine of France.’
‘Damaris! What a pretty name!’ said Loswa. ‘It makes one think of damask roses, and she is rather like one. Where does she live, Monsignor?’
‘She lives with her grandfather on a little island which belongs to him. He is a very well-to-do man, but a great brute in many ways; he is not cruel to the girl, but were she to cross his wi
ll I imagine he would be. Krapotkine is his hero and Karl Marx his prophet; he is the most ferocious anarchist. You know the sort of man. It is a sort very common in France, and especially so in the South. Did you give her a jewel, Madame Nadège? Ah, that was a very great offence! She must have been mortally offended. When that child is en fête she has a row of pearls as big as any in your jewel-cases.’
‘She looked a poor girl, and I thought I should please her,’ said Nadine, with impatience. ‘Who was to tell that the owner of pearls as big as sparrows’ eggs was rowing in a fruit-boat, bare-armed and bare-headed?’
‘Where did you say that she lived?’ asked Loswa, curious and interested.
‘Oh, on an island a long way off from here,’ said Melville, regretting that he had spoken of this source of dissension.
‘Take me to that island, Monsignor,’ murmured Loris Loswa in his ear.
‘Oh, indeed no,’ said the priest hastily. ‘You are a “cursed aristocrat;” the old man would receive you with a thrust of a pike.’
‘I would take my chance of the pike,’ said Loswa, ‘and I would assure him that the future lies with the Anarchists, for I believe it, and I would not add that I also think that their millennium will be most highly uncomfortable.’
‘Will you take me to that island, Monsignor?’ said Nadine. ‘It will not be favourable to fashionable impressionists like Loris.’
Loswa coloured a little with irritation; he had not thought she would overhear his request. He was, besides, despite his vanity, always vaguely sensible that her admiration of his powers was tinged with contempt.
‘You, Madame!’ cried Melville, cordially wishing that the island of Damaris Bérarde was far away in the Pacific in lieu of a score of leagues off the shores of Savoy. ‘Would I take the world incarnate, the most seductive and irresistible of all its votaries, into a convent of Oblates to torture all the good Sisters condemned to eternal seclusion? That poor little girl is a little recluse, a little barbarian, but she is happy in her solitude, in her sauvagerie. Were she once to see the Countess Othmar she would know peace no more.’
‘She must see many very like me if she live a mile or so off these shores,’ said Nadine, dismissing the subject with indifference. ‘I am sure it is she who is to be envied if she can find any entertainment in rowing about in a boat full of oranges. I would do it this moment if it would amuse me, but it would not. That is the penalty of having sophisticated and corrupted tastes. How old is your paragon?’
‘Did I say she was a paragon? She is a good little girl. Her age? I should think fifteen, sixteen; certainly not more. Her birth is rather curious. Her mother was an actress, and her father the master of a fruit-carrying brig; dissimilar enough progenitors. Her father was drowned, and her mother died of nostalgia for the stage; and Damaris was left to the care of her grandfather, the fierce old Communist I have described to you. However, he is not so terrible a bigot after all, for he allowed her to be taught by the Sisters at the Villefranche Convent, as a concession to me when I knew him first, in return for a little service I had done him. He thinks it does not much matter what women do; to him they are only beasts of burden; he likes to see his hung with pearls only as he puts tassels and ribbons on his cows when they are taken to market.’
‘And what service did you render him?’
‘Oh, nothing worth mentioning; a trifle,’ said Melville, who never spoke of his own deeds of heroism, which were many. The old man’s younger and only remaining son had lain dying of Asiatic cholera, brought to the coast in some infected load of Eastern rags, with which they had manured the olives one hot August day. Not a soul had dared to approach the plague-stricken bed, except the courtly churchman whose smile was so sought by great ladies and whose wit was so prized at dinner-parties. He had not abandoned it until all was over, and with his own hands had aided Jean Bérarde to lay the body of his boy in mother-earth. When the grave was filled up, the old socialist, to whom priests had been as loathliest vermin, gave his knotted work-worn hand to the slender white hand of Melville:
‘The only one that had the courage!’ he muttered. ‘Do not try to do anything with me, it would be no use; but do what you like about the child. I will say nothing. You alone stayed by me to see her uncle die.’
So the girl Damaris had been allowed to go in her boat to learn of the Sisters on the mainland, and had been allowed to go also to Mass on high days and holy days. But Melville saw no necessity to say all this to his worldly friends upon the sea-terrace of St. Pharamond. Nay, he even reproached himself that, in a momentary unconsidered impulse, he had given the name of the girl to Loswa. Loswa was not perhaps a man to go in cold blood on a seducer’s errand, but he was conceited, sensual, egotistic, and accustomed to take his own way without much consideration for its consequences, whether to himself or to others. And the worldly wisdom of Melville told him he had committed an imprudence.
‘Jean Bérarde,’ he continued, ‘of course, abhors priests, and would have a general massacre of the Church. But I chanced to do him a service, as I said, some time ago, and so he allows me now and then to go and sit under his big olives and talk to the child, and even, grudgingly, lets her go to Mass now and then. His past is written clearly enough in the history of Savoy, but he either does not know or does not care anything about his descent. All he does care about are his profits from olives and oranges, and also, I suspect, from smuggling. What is infinitely droll is, that the principles which slew his forefathers and destroyed the cradle of his race have become his own. Perhaps the fury of the Ça ira got into him, being begotten, as he was, in that time of blood and flame through which his progenitors passed. Anyhow he is the fiercest of socialists now.
‘The Counts de la Bérarde were very mighty people; almost as great as their suzerains and neighbours, the Counts of Dauphiné. The cradle of their race, of which you may see one tower standing now, was set amongst the glaciers and gorges of the Val St. Christophe; it stood above the Romanche on a great slope of gneiss, with the snow mountains at its back. Up to the time of Richelieu the Bérardes were omnipotent, and they had sway as far down as the sea coast, and it is said that sea piracy, as well as stoppage of land travellers going on their horses and sumpter mules through the passes, swelled their wealth and their power not a little. All these mountain lords were robbers in those days. If you have never been up as far as the St. Christophe valley, you should go as soon as the weather opens and the roads are passable; all the cols and the combes are fine, well worth a little Alpine climbing; and the Pointe des Écrins may hold its own with the peaks of the Engadine.
‘Well, to revert to the Counts de Bérarde: Richelieu broke the back of their power — it is odd that a Churchman, doing all he could to strengthen the hands of a king, did in truth lay the first stone of what became centuries after the Revolution! — their chiefs were beheaded on the ramparts of Briançon, their castle in the Alps was razed, and only two or three of their younger scions survived the general destruction of the race. From one of these distant branches, Jean de la Bérarde, who had a small stronghold on the sea, and who became, by all these executions, the head of the family, this old man who owns Bonaventure, and is the rudest and roughest of cruisers and farmers, is lineally descended. I have been at pains to make out his genealogy. These matters always have interest for me, and it is curious to trace how the old patrician strain comes out in the girl, his grand-daughter, though he himself is nothing more than a boor. The Bérardes never recovered the massacres and confiscations of the reign of Louis XIII., though they were small suzerains on the sea-coast up to the days of Louis XV. They then fell into poverty, and lost their hold over their neighbours; the Terror extinguished them entirely; they were swallowed up in the night of anarchy. But Jean Bérarde of Bonaventure is legally heir of the Count Alain de la Bérarde, who was taken to Toulon, and shot there by the Maratists of Freron and Barras. His only son, being a lad at the time, was saved by disguising himself as a fisherman, and, being utterly beggared by the Ja
cobins, took to the coasting trade, and in time saved money, married a peasant, and bought the island: my socialist friend was his son.
‘That is the story of these people, who in two generations have dropped the very memory of the fierce nobles they sprang from so entirely that the old man on Bonaventure is as rabid a Communist as any man can be who has property and clings to it. There — I have been terribly prosy, and Madame will say that all this genealogy is of no earthly interest to her; and, indeed, it cannot be to any of you, only that to a student of human nature it is always, in a measure, interesting to see how old races look under new hoods.’
‘In this instance,’ said Nadine smiling, ‘the old race looks very pretty under the Phrygian cap. The girl is unusually handsome. You would be wild to paint her, Loswa, if only she were a duchess!’
‘I would ask no better fate as it is,’ he replied. ‘But perhaps it might not be so easy. The grandfather Bérarde is sure to be a Cerberus.’
‘You must air your destructive doctrines before him; he will be fascinated; he will not know that you live with the duchesses, and would not trouble yourself actually to walk the length of a boulevard to save All The Russias.’
‘I am not a political hypocrite, Madame, though you are pleased to ridicule me as an artistic impostor,’ said Loswa, with an angry flush on his face.
She cast the end of her cigarette into the sea.
‘Oh no; you are not a hypocrite; you would very much like to see the destruction of the whole world, provided only that your own armchair should withstand the shock. There are so many anarchists of that type; and, indeed, why should you die for politics or creed when you can live and paint such charming pictures? For your pictures are very charming, though they are all pearl-powder and point-lace, all satins and brocades, and we are all going to Court in every one of them.’
‘Vandyke did not paint beggars,’ said Loswa, who would have lost his temper had he dared.