by Ouida
She looked at him with amusement.
‘But you are not Vandyke, my dear Loris; you are, at most, Lely or Boucher, and the pearl-powder has got into your brushes a little more than it should have done. You have only one defect as an artist, but it is a capital offence, and you will not outgrow it — you are never natural!’
He was silent from vexation.
He had an exaggerated opinion of his own genius, and saw in himself a mingling of Clouet and Boucher, Leonardo and Largillière, and was often restless and nervous under his sense of her depreciative criticism; but he was very proud of the intimacy he was allowed to enjoy with her, and usually bore her chastisement with a spaniel’s humility; a quality rare in him, spoilt and courted darling of high dames as he was.
‘If you do take a portrait of that child,’ she pursued, pointing to the distant boat, ‘you will be utterly unable to portray her as she is; you will never give the sea-stains on her gown, the sea-tan on her face, the rough dull red of that old worn sea-cap. You will idealise her, which with you means that you will make her utterly artificial. She will become a goddess of liberty, and she will look like a maid of honour frisking under a republican disguise to amuse a frisky Court. The simple sea-born creature yonder, rowing through blue water, and thinking of the sale of her oranges or the capture of her fish, will be altogether and forever beyond you. It is always beyond the Lelys and the Bouchers, though it would not have been beyond Vandyke. Do you think you could paint a forest-tree or a field-flower? Not you; your daisy would become a gardenia, and your larch would be a lime on the boulevards.’
‘Am I to understand, Madame, that you have suddenly become a patroness of nature? Then surely even I, poor creature of the boulevards though I be, need not despair of becoming natürlich?’
‘You mistake,’ said Nadine with a little sadness. ‘I have lived in a hothouse, but I have always envied those who lived in the open air. Besides, I am not an artist; I am a mere mondaine. I was born in the world as an oyster is in its shallows. But an artist, if he be worthy the name, should abhor the world. He should live and work and think and dream in the open air, and in full contact with nature. Do you suppose Millet could have breathed an hour in your studio with its velvets and tapestries and lacquer work, with its draperies and screens and rugs, and carefully shaded windows? He would have been stifled. Why is nearly all modern work so valueless? Because it is nearly all of it studio-work; work done at high pressure and in an artificial light. Do you think that Michel Angelo could have endured to dwell in Cromwell Road? Or do you think that Murillo or Domenichino would have built themselves an hotel in the Avenue Villiers? Why is Basil Vereschaguin, with all his faults and deformities, original and in a way sublime? Because he works in the open air; in no light tempered otherwise than by the clouds as they pass, or by the leaves as they move.’
‘For heaven’s sake!’ cried Loswa with a gesture of appeal.
She laughed a little.
‘Ah, my poor Court poodle, with your pretty tricks and graces! — of course, the very name of our wolf of the forests is terrible to you. But I suppose the Court has made the poodle what he is; I suppose it is as much your duchesses’ fault as your own.’
Then she turned away and left this favourite of fortune and great ladies to his own reflections. They were irritated and mortified; bitter with that bitterest of all earthly things, wounded vanity.
Good heavens! he thought, with a sharp stinging sense of a woman’s base ingratitude, was it for this that he had painted her portrait in such wise that season after season each succeeding one had been the centre of all eyes in the Paris Salon? Was it for this that he had immortalised her face looking out from a cloud of shadow like a narcissus in the mists of March? — that he had drawn her in every attitude and every costume, from the loose white draperies of her hours of langour to the golden tissues and crowding jewels of her court-dress at imperial palaces? Was it for this that he had composed that divinest portrait of them all, in which, with a knot of stephanotis at her breast and a collar of pearls at her throat, she seemed to smile at all who looked on her that slight, amused, disdainful smile which had killed men as surely as any silver-hilted dagger lying in an ivory case, which once was steeped in aqua Tofana for Lucrezia or Bianca? Was it for this! — to be called opprobrious, derisive names, and have Basil Vereschaguin, the painter of death, of carnage, of horror, of brown Hindoos and hideous Tartars, vaunted before him as his master!
He hated Vereschaguin as a Sèvres vase, had it a mind and soul to hate, might hate the bronze statue of a gladiator; and his tormentor, in a moment of mercilessness and candour, had wounded him with a weapon whose use he never forgave.
‘He is a coxcomb! Béthune is quite right,’ she said of him when Melville hinted that she had been too cruel. ‘He has marvellous talent and technique, but he dares to think that these two are genius. If he had not likened himself to Vandyke I might perhaps never have told him what I think of his place in art. He is a pretty painter, a very pretty painter, and his portraits of me are charming; but if they be looked at at all in the twentieth century they will hardly rank higher than we rank now the pastels of Rosalba; certainly not higher than we rank the portraits of Greuze.’
‘If I were a painter I would be content to be Greuze,’ said Melville with a smile.
‘No you would not,’ said Nadine; ‘you would not be content to be a d’Estrées in your own profession, nor any other mere Court cardinal.’
CHAPTER VII.
The following morning Loris Loswa rose much earlier than his wont, and went out of the gilded gate of the pretty little villa which he had taken for the season at St. Raphael; a coquettish place with large gardens and trellised paths overhung with creepers; and down below, a small cutter ready for use in a nook of the bay where the aloes and the mimosa grew thickest. It all belonged to a friend of his, who was away in distant lands to escape his creditors, and by whose misfortunes Loswa had profited with that easy egotism which had been so advantageous to him throughout his life, and which looked so good-natured that no one resented it. He descended this morning to the shore by the winding cactus-lined path which led down to it, and asked the sailors if they knew of an island called Bonaventure. They knew nothing about it; they, however, consulted the admiralty maps and found it: a tiny dot some leagues to the south-westward.
A fisherman who was on the beach at the time told him more. He knew the island, everybody knew it; but nobody ever was allowed to land there; its owner was an odd man, morose and suspicious; the demoiselle was good and kind; the islet belonged to Jean Bérarde, who owned every inch of it. He would leave it to the girl of course. It was small, but of very considerable profit. Loswa listened with impatience, and told his skipper to make for the isle as fast as he could. He himself knew nothing of the sea, and hated it; but he was piqué au jeu. Melville had almost forbidden him to go thither, and the great lady who had ridiculed him had doubted his power to paint the picture of a peasant-girl. The irritation of antagonism had aroused all the obstinacy and all the capricious self-will of an undisciplined and vain nature.
‘To Bonaventure!’ he said with triumph, as in the glad and cloudless morning air his little vessel danced over the waves, the great seagulls wheeling and screaming in her wake. There were a buoyant sea and a favouring breeze.
Loswa detested both sea and country, and was never at heart content off the asphalte of the boulevards. But since it would have looked very vulgar to spend his whole winter in Paris, he selected the south coast usually for the colder months, because the world went with him there, because he saw so many faces that were familiar, and because on this shore so thickly set with châlets and villas, so artificially adorned, so trimmed, and trained, and levelled, and planted by architect and landscape gardener, it was possible for him to forget that he was not in Paris; the very sea itself, so blue, so tranquil, so idly basking in broad light and luminous horizons, seemed like the painted sea of an operetta by Lecocq.
Bes
ides, though he had no pleasure in rural or maritime things, found no joy in solitude and no consolation in nature for the loss of the movement of the world, he could not have been the fine colourist he was without possessing a fine sense of colour, and the power to appreciate beautiful lines, and all the changeful effects of light and shade. He did not see Nature as Millet or Corot saw it, but as Lancret or Coypel saw it. It was only a background for a nymph or a goddess to him as to them; but he was not insensible to the forms which made up that background: the sunlit vapour, the blue mountain, the golden woodland, or the shadowy lake.
The sea was full of life: market-boats, fishing-boats, skiffs of all kinds, with striped curved lateen sails, were crossing each other on it. There were a few yachts, French, English, American, at anchor in the bays, in waiting for the cup-races; there were some merchant ships afar off, brown-canvased brigs bearing in from Genoa or Ajaccio, and the ugly black smoke of a big steamer here and there defaced the marvellous blue and rose of the air at the birth of day. The sea was buoyant but not rough, his light cutter few airily as a curlew over the azure plain. There were mists to the southward, lovely white mists, airy and suggestive as the veil of a bride, but they floated away before the sun, so rapidly as the day grew on, that the bold indented lines of Corsica became visible, bathed in a rosy and golden warmth. He had enough soul in him to feel the beauty of the morning though he had been playing baccarat at the club till an hour or two previously; to be conscious of the charm of this full clear sunrise which bathed the world of waters in its radiance, of the silver-shining wings of the white gulls dipping in the hollow of the wave, of the grandeur of the land as he looked back at it with its semicircles of snow-capped hills towering to the skies. But he would not have cared for them had there been no human interest beside them.
After sailing steadily some two hours or so they sighted, and in another two hours neared, a little island which was certainly the one marked on the French chart as Bonaventure, lying all alone far out to the south-west. Loswa did not need the positive assertion of his crew to tell him that he had arrived at his desired goal. It was small, conical-shaped, high, and steep, with a broad reef of sand to the northward. It rose aloft in the air, grey with olives, green with orange-trees. No habitation was visible upon it; but on the sand there was drawn up high and dry an old boat with a sail of Venetian red stained brown by wear and tear.
The island had evidently been made fruitful at the cost of many centuries of labour; the natural rock of it was terraced with many ridges rising one above another, each planted with productive trees; the soil had no doubt been carried up load by load with infinite trouble; but the effect of the whole was luxuriant and picturesque, as the conelike mass of verdure, here silver-grey and there emerald green, towered upward in the thin sun-pierced vapours of the early day.
The soundings showed deep water almost up to the rock itself.
‘I am going to sketch,’ said Loswa to his skipper as he pointed to the level strip of sand. ‘Let me land there.’
Their assertions that no one ever did land there he disregarded. A small boat was rowed up to the strip of beach, and he got out, bidding his sailors wait round the edge of a jutting rock, which would give them shade as the day should advance.
He glanced at the old red coble drawn up on the shore. It was the same he had seen three days before; he felt sure of it by its colour and its build.
He looked about him and around him for a means of ascent, and saw a zigzag path that wound up through the hanging orchards of olive, of lemon, and of orange, and higher still the rope-ladder called passerelle, so often used in the Riviera to climb steep rocks. The air was full of the intense perfume of the trees, which were starred all over with their white blossoms. He thought of Sicily, where you have to shut your door against the fragrance of the fields in spring, lest you should faint and sleep for ever from their fragrance.
The path and the passerelle would certainly, he reasoned, lead up to any house there might be at the summit. He slung his sketching things over his shoulder and began to mount the crooked rocky road of moss-grown stone with cyclamen growing in its crevices, and the rose-hued flowers of the leafless cereus springing up here and there.
But he was not allowed to ascend unchallenged; high above him there was a rustling sound, then a deep angry growl, and in a moment or two a great white Pyrenean dog showed himself, stared down at him with frank hostility, and bounded headlong from ridge to ridge underneath the boughs, with full intent to reach him and devour him. But a voice called aloud: ‘Tò, tò, Clovis!’ and Loswa smiled. He knew he had succeeded.
Through the labyrinth of branches, springing after the dog, came the girl who had thrown back the gold bracelet to the lady of St. Pharamond.
‘The dog will not hurt you whilst I am here,’ she called out to him. ‘But he might kill you if I were not. Do you want my grandfather? Why have you landed here? It is private ground. He has gone to Grasse for two days to see an oil merchant.’
Loswa felt that he could not have timed his visit more felicitously.
‘Good heavens! what a handsome child,’ he thought, as he bowed to her with his easy grace and that eloquent glance which had power to stir the most languid pulses of his patrician sitters.
‘I landed in hopes that I might be allowed to paint the view from this exquisite little spot,’ he said with well-acted hesitation in his manner. ‘A friend of mine, who is, I think, a friend of yours too, a priest of the name of Melville, has spoken to me so often of the beauty of your island.’
Standing above him, holding the big dog by the collar, she smiled at the name of Melville, and came a few steps nearer with more confidence. She never for a moment doubted the entire truth of what he said.
Her blue-and-brown-striped linen gown was but a wisp; it had been drenched through in its time with sea-water, and had the stains of grasses, and dews, and sands, and fruits upon it; it was bound round her waist by a leathern belt, and its short sleeves were pulled up to the shoulder, as they had been the day before. But no artist would have wished for a better dress, and even a sculptor would not have desired to remove it from the limbs that it clung to so closely that it hid nothing of their perfect shape and the curves of the throat and breast that had the indecision and softness of childhood with the fulness of feminine growth. Her hair was tucked away under a red fisher cap, a veritable bonnet rouge; and her large brilliant eyes, of an indescribable colour, were shining, as if the sun was imprisoned in them, under level, dark delicate eyebrows. Her skin was fair, her hair auburn. He thought he had seen nothing so perfectly lovely in all his life: it was a living Titian, a virgin Giorgione.
‘Anyone who knows Monsignor Melville is welcome to Bonaventure,’ she said frankly. ‘It is a pity my grandfather is away. He does not like strangers, but a friend of Monsignor’s would not seem so to him. No one has ever been here to paint anything before. What is it you want to paint — the house?’
Loswa knew that he had done a dishonourable thing, and a mean one, in using Melville’s name as a passport to a place where Melville would never have allowed him to go had he known it; but, like everyone else, having begun on a wrong course he went on in it. He had succeeded so well at the commencement that he would not listen to that delicacy of good breeding which represented conscience to him.
‘Do not be afraid of Clovis. He will not hurt you now he sees that I speak to you; he is so sensible. Will you come now or another day?’ she asked him with the frankness of a boy.
‘We have a Latin poet who tells us that to-day alone is our own,’ said Loswa with a smile. ‘I will come now at once, and most gladly. Clovis is a grand dog and a good guard for his young mistress,’ he added; thinking to himself, ‘how lovely she is, and she knows it no more than if she were a sea anemone on the shore; and she looks at me and speaks to me with no more embarrassment than if I were but the wooden figure of a ship!’
‘I will come up most gladly,’ he said again, with more ardour than he showe
d in a duchess’s drawing-rooms. ‘It is so very kind of you. I am sure the view from the summit must be magnificent. I fear though,’ he added, with hypocritical modesty, ‘that it will be beyond my powers.’
‘I hope not. I shall like to see anyone paint,’ she said with cordiality; and added, a little ashamed, ‘I have never seen anyone paint; I have heard of such a thing of course, and there are the pictures in the churches and chapels which one knows were painted by men; but I have no idea of how it is done.’
‘You should have been shown by Raphael himself,’ said Loswa.
‘Raphael?’ she echoed. ‘Oh no, he is our fruit-packer; he would not know how to do it any better than I do,’ she said as she turned and began to ascend to show him the way.
‘Can you climb?’ she added, looking at him doubtfully. ‘I mean climb where it is like a stone wall?’
She had taken him under her protection and into her favour, but he felt that he would have preferred to this frank innocent friendliness a certain hesitation and embarrassment such as would have indicated a different kind of sentiment as possible. She was as kind to him, as simple and frank and candid with him, as if he were any old fisherman that she had known from her birth. It was not what he desired, yet it had a certain charm; it was so childlike, so honest, so free from all affectation or self-consciousness, or lurking suspicion or intention of any sort.
‘Clovis is so good,’ she pursued, all unconscious of his reflections. ‘His wife (she is called Brunehildt) had four puppies yesterday. Two were drowned; it was such a pity! I am going to give one of the two left to Monsignor; he is always fond of dogs. Take care how you come up, it is very steep; for me I am used to it. I run up and down a dozen times a day; but a person not used to it may slip.’
It was, indeed, steep, and often there were ledges of rock in the way which had to be jumped over or scrambled over in any handiest fashion, whilst on others the perpendicular face of the cliff could only be ascended by the rope-ladder so often in use in the Riviera; but Loswa, in an indolent way, was athletic; he had in his youth been skilled in gymnastic exercises, and though now enervated by his life in cities, he kept apace with her, and soon had gained the level summit of the island, a broad green tableland planted with olives and oranges, with here and there a great stone pine, relic of the wild pine woods which, before the petite culture had stepped thither with axe and spade, had clothed doubtless the whole of Bonaventure down to the water’s edge.