Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  There was some ground planted with cabbages and artichokes, some place where maize would be planted later in the season, but the chief of the land was orchard; and in the midst of it stood a long, low whitewashed house, with pink shutters and a tiled roof.

  ‘Now look!’ she said, with a little pride in her voice as she stretched her hand out to the northward view.

  Everywhere far below them, stretching out to infinite indefinite horizons, was the blue sea studded with various sails; and the beautiful coast stretched likewise away into endless realms of sparkling light; the range of the mountains rose blue and snow-crowned behind that fairy shore; and this enchanted paradise was always there to call men’s thoughts to nature, and they in it only thought of the hell of the punters, the caress of the cocotte, the shining gold rolling in under the croupier’s rake!

  Familiar as he was with this sea and land, he could not restrain an exclamation of wondering admiration.

  ‘No wonder you have become the beautiful thing you are, looking on all that beauty from your birth!’ he said in an impulse of frank admiration, mingled with his habitual language of flattery.

  The girl laughed.

  ‘Do you think I am beautiful? Everybody always says that. But grandfather grumbles; he says it is the devil’s gift. Myself, I do not know; the flowers are beautiful, but I do not think that human beings are so.’

  ‘And you have grown up like a flower — —’

  ‘How did you know about me?’ she interrupted him. ‘Did Monsignor Melville speak so much of me? He was with my uncle in his last illness, you know, and whenever he is on this coast he comes to us. You like the view?’ she continued with satisfaction and a sense of possession of it. ‘Yes; it is good to see, is it not? But I am happier when I am down on the shore.’

  ‘Indeed! Why?’

  ‘Because there one only wants to swim, and here one wants to fly. Now, one does swim; one cannot fly.’

  ‘To covet the impossible is the only divine thing in man,’ said he with a smile. ‘It is just because we have that longing to fly that we may hope we are made to do something more than walk.’

  ‘Do you mean that discontent is good?’ she said with surprise.

  ‘In a certain measure, perhaps.’

  ‘Content is better,’ she said sturdily.

  ‘I hope you will always be blessed with it. It is like a swallow, it brings peace where it rests,’ said her guest with a little sigh; and he thought: ‘My lady yonder is never content; it is the penalty of culture. Will this child be so always in her ignorance? Will she marry the skipper of a merchant-ship or the owner of an olive-yard, and live happily ever afterwards, with a tribe of little brown-eyed children that will run out into the road with flowers for the carriages? I suppose so; why not? Melville said in her little way she was an heiress. Of course, all the louts that own a fishing-coble or an acre of orange-trees will be eager to annex her and her island.’

  She was walking by his side under the gnarled olives which had been stripped a month before of their black berries. She was looking at him frankly, curiously, with doubtful glances.

  ‘I am afraid you are of the noblesse,’ she said, abruptly stopping short within a yard of the house.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ he said, aware that he received the prettiest of indirect compliments which a much flattered life had ever given him.

  ‘You look like it,’ she answered. ‘You have an air about you, and your linen is so fine, and your voice is soft and slow. It is only the noble people who have that kind of music in their voices.’

  ‘I wish I were a peasant if it would please you better,’ he said gallantly.

  She answered very literally:

  ‘That is nonsense. You cannot wish such a thing; no one ever wishes to go down. And, for myself, I do not mind; it is my grandfather who hates the aristocrats.’

  ‘So I have heard,’ said Loswa. ‘But he is out to-day, you say. Will you not let me sketch this superb view?’

  ‘Yes, if you like. I never saw anyone paint, as I told you; I shall be glad to see it. But will you not come in and eat and drink something first? I have heard that the nobles, when they are not dressing and dancing, are always eating and drinking.’

  ‘Nothing more cruel was ever said of them by all their satirists,’ answered Loswa. ‘It will be very kind indeed if you will give me a glass of water; I need nothing else.’

  ‘You shall have some of Catherine’s cakes,’ said the girl, ‘and some coffee and a fresh egg. Catherine — she is our servant — makes beautiful cakes when she is not cross. Why are people who are old so often cross? Is it the trouble of living so long that makes them so? If it be that, I would rather die young. I think one ought to be like the olive-trees; the older they are the better fruit they bear.’

  Then she called aloud, ‘Catherine! Catherine! here is a stranger who wants some breakfast,’ and ran across the bit of rough grass before the house, where cocks and hens, pigeons and rabbits, a tethered ass and a pet kid, were enjoying the fine morning together in harmony.

  An old woman in a white cap showed herself for a moment in the doorway, grumbled inarticulately, and disappeared.

  ‘She is gone to get it,’ said Damaris. ‘She is very cross, as I tell you, but she is very good for all that. I have known her all my life. Her honey is the best in the country. She always prays for the bees. My grandfather does not know it, but when it is swarming time she says a paternoster over each hive, and the honey comes so yellow, so smooth, so fine; its taste is like the smell of thyme. Come through the house to my terrace; you shall have your breakfast there.’

  He followed her through the house, an ugly whitewashed place, with nothing of grace or colour about it, though cleaner than most such dwellings are upon the mainland; it smelt sweetly, too, from the flood of fragrant, orange-scented air which poured through past its open doors, and the odour from the bales of packed oranges which were stored in its passages and lumber-rooms, awaiting transport to the beach below. In the guest-chamber there was some old oaken furniture of which he recognised the age and value, and some chairs of repoussé leather, which would have fetched a high price; but it was all dreary, dull, stiff, and the figure of the girl, with her brilliant, luminous beauty, and her vividly-coloured clothes, looked like a pomegranate flaming in a dusky cellar.

  ‘Come out here,’ she said to him, and led him out on to a little terrace.

  It was whitewashed, like all the stone of the house, but it was gay and bright. Its gallery was covered with a Canadian vine still red; it seemed to hang above the sea, so steeply did that side of the island slope downward beneath it; it had some cane chairs in it and a little marble table, a red-striped awning was stretched above it.

  ‘This is all mine,’ she said, with pride. ‘You shall eat here. Take that long chair: it came off one of the great ships that go the voyages to India; the mate of the ship gave it me. I made that awning myself out of a sail. I bring my books here and read. Sometimes I sit here half the night instead of going to bed — that is, when the nightingales are singing in the orange-trees. My grandfather will always have the house-door shut and bolted by eight o’clock, even in summer. So I come here; it seems such folly to go to bed in the short nights, they are as bright as day. The time to sleep then is noon. You rest, and I will go and bring Catherine, and your breakfast.’

  He caught her hand as she was about to go away.

  ‘Pray, stay,’ he murmured. ‘It is to hear you talk that I care; I want nothing else, not even that glass of water; I only made it an excuse to come into your house.’

  She drew her hand from him and frowned a little.

  ‘Why should you make an excuse? If you had said you wished to come I would have let you; if you do not want to eat there is nothing to come for; I am never indoors except to eat, or if it rain very heavily.’

  Then she went, and he dared not detain her lest he should alarm her. She seemed to him like a bird which alights near a stranger so long as
there is no movement, but at a single sound takes flight. Left alone he sat still in the chair she had assigned to him, and gazed over the sea; there was nothing except sea visible from this little terrace.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  In a little while she returned, bearing in her strong grasp an old silver tray, with coffee, cream, and sugar in old silver pots.

  The servant followed her, cross, wrinkled and suspicious, carrying bread and honey and oranges, and a pile of sweet flat cakes. Damaris set down her tray on the marble table.

  ‘We have a few things like this,’ she said, touching the old silver. ‘We were noble, too, once, very, very long ago, they say; but my grandfather does not believe it. I like to believe it. It may be nonsense, but one likes to fancy that ever, ever so long ago one’s forefathers were fighting men, not labourers; it seems to make one ready to fight too. It must make a difference, I think, in oneself whether they were soldiers or slaves. Not, you know,’ she added, after a moment’s pause, ‘that I do not think la petite culture the happiest life in the world; but the labourer is narrow, mean, horribly fond of money, and very rough to his women, and I suppose the poor were still worse in that distant time.’

  She poured him out his coffee as she spoke, and filled up the cup with foaming milk, and pressed on him the rolls, the cakes, the honey. The china was the heavy earthenware which rustic people use, and did not suit the old silver of the tray and of the vessels; but Loswa, for once, was not critical; he thought he had never tasted anything more delicious than was this island fare.

  Damaris, having served him, ate and drank herself, sitting on a wooden stool beside the balustrade covered with the reddened creeper. She did not want anything, but not to break bread with a guest seemed to her bad manners. She had pulled her sleeves down and put on shoes and stockings. She had thrown aside her woollen cap; her silky, golden curls shone in the sun; her eyes looked at him with honest inquisitiveness and astonishment. Suddenly she said aloud:

  ‘Ah! I remember now! It was you who were with that lady yesterday when she threw me the gold bracelet over the wall.’

  Loswa assented, but he would have preferred to forget his friend at that moment, being uneasily conscious of the contempt with which his present position on this terrace would be regarded by her did she ever know of it.

  ‘Did she take me for a beggar?’ said Damaris, with anger glistening under her long lashes.

  ‘Oh no, she only wished to please you — to surprise you. You see, she could not tell who you were.’

  The girl’s cheeks grew a deeper rose.

  ‘That is true,’ she said, with her first touch of embarrassment; ‘I was rowing, and one cannot row in fine clothes. Perhaps, if she saw me at Mass — —’

  ‘If she saw you now!’ said he, with a glance of meaning thrown away upon her. ‘Remember, she hardly saw you at all; only an old boat, a pile of oranges, a ragged sail — —’

  ‘My sail is very shabby,’ said Damaris with shame. ‘I took the new one to make this awning, and my grandfather was angry and would not let me have another. Who is that lady? She looked very pretty. Is she your wife?’

  ‘She is the Countess Othmar.’

  ‘The Countess Othmar!’ she repeated in a little awe. Even she in her solitude had heard that name of power. The narrative was very vague to her; she had never known more than the bare outline of it, but she remembered, when she was a child sitting amongst the daffodils and plucking them on the grass before the house on Bonaventure one evening in the springtime, hearing Catherine, who had been with a load of fruit to the mainland, cry aloud to Raphael:

  ‘Holy Virgin, what think you? The petiote of Nicole, the wife of Othmar, is dead!’

  And the child, pausing with the daffodils lying in tumbled gold upon her lap, had listened and heard all that was known of that early death, which only the swallows had witnessed and the blind house-dog had mourned. She had always remembered it, and often, when she had seen the daffodils yellow in the grass of March, had thought of it again, and her imagination had been busy with it, creating bodily forms for the people of whom she knew naught but the names. Therefore, when the word ‘Othmar’ fell now upon her ear, it moved her with a certain thrill, almost as of personal pain.

  ‘You have heard of her?’ said Loswa.

  ‘Not of her,’ said Damaris gravely; ‘of the one who died — who killed herself, they say, because he loved another woman.’

  ‘Bah!’ said Loswa, with the light contempt for all such tragic follies which the boulevardier always affects, even when he does not feel it.

  ‘They said so,’ repeated Damaris, with her eyes very large and serious.

  ‘Do you like this lady very much?’ she asked, after a pause.

  ‘She is a charming person; yes.’

  ‘Is she a very great lady? Does she reign over anything?’

  ‘Over everyone she approaches, if she can,’ said he with some impatience; ‘and nearly always she can, for she is a person of very strong will, and influences others more than she knows or they know.’

  ‘And what does she do when she has influenced them? Monsignor says that to possess influence is to have the ten talents, and that we shall have to account for the use of every one of them.’

  ‘That is just the chief mischief,’ said Loswa, gloomily thinking of himself, not of his auditor. ‘It is the getting the influence that amuses her; that she cares about. When once she has got it you are nothing at all to her; no more than a glove she has worn.’

  ‘She must be a very cruel woman,’ said Damaris.

  ‘Oh no,’ he protested, with a sudden sense of his disloyalty, ‘she is not cruel at all, she is only indifferent.’

  ‘Indifferent? That is to neither like nor dislike? I do not understand how one can be like that. One must either have good weather or bad; one must either love or hate.’

  ‘She does neither,’ said he with a sigh; then, with a sense that it was altogether wrong to blame a great lady and a countrywoman of his own to a little country girl whom he had never seen before, he changed the subject abruptly.

  ‘Are you not very dull on your island? It is a long way off the mainland.’

  ‘Dull? Oh, people must be very stupid who are ever dull. There is always so much to do out among the fruit-trees or down by the beach. The days are always too short for me.’

  ‘That is the charm of being fifteen. Are you always on this island? Do you never go to Nice?’

  ‘I have never seen Nice. I did want to see the Carnival last year, but my grandfather would not hear of it. It was Raphael told me about it. It must have been very fine; but, of course, we have nothing to do with the mainland, that is only for the rich idle people. I hear they sleep all the day and buzz about all the night, like moths or like bats. What a strange life it must be!’

  Loswa thought of the great gaslit glittering Salle des Jeux which was not more than a dozen leagues off this primitive orange-island.

  ‘You are happier here, in the middle of your blue water, putting out your oil lamps as the moon rises,’ he replied. ‘Chateaubriand might have lived on Bonaventure. Who would have believed there was anything so solitary and so innocent as this within a few hours’ sail of the Blanc paradise?’

  ‘What is that?’ said Damaris, who, although she could see afar off the palms and domes of Monte Carlo gleaming in the sun on the northward horizon every time she sailed that way, was as profoundly ignorant of the tripot and its works as if Bonaventure had been in the Pacific.

  ‘I have heard,’ she continued, ‘that there are very strange things and people over there, that it is a feast-day every day with them, and all their life like a fair. My grandfather always says he would shoot them all down as they shot the hostages in the Commune, but I do not think that would be right. If they are silly, one should pity them.’

  ‘They are silly indeed, and I fear your sweet pity would not avail to save them. The feast-day is a sorry affair at its close.’

  ‘Oh, I know. I have
seen Raphael come home drunk and beat Jacqueline (that is his wife) because she cried; and he is as good as gold when he is sober, and as gentle as a sheep when there is no drink.’

  ‘In some way we all drink, we unfortunates,’ said Loswa; then, seeing her look of surprise, he added, ‘I did not speak literally, my dear; your Raphael’s drink is a petit vin bleu, and ours is a costly thing we call Pleasure, but it comes to the same result; only, I suppose, Raphael has some five or six days in the week that he is good for work, and we cannot say as much as that. We are all the week round at the fair.’

  She ruffled her pretty loose short locks that hung over her forehead, and her brilliant eyes looked at him perplexedly.

  ‘I am glad I live on the island,’ she said as the issue of her perplexity.

  ‘And I too am glad you do,’ said he, with more sincerity than he usually put into his pretty speeches.

  He felt that before he approached the great object of his voyage he must justify his pretences and win her confidence by painting something which would please her fancy. To his facility of touch it was easy and rapid work to sketch on his block of paper the sea view, the terrace wall, the interior of the sitting-room, the old chairs, and the silver tankards. Sheet after sheet was filled and cut off and sent fluttering into her eager hands. To her it seemed the work of magic. Just a little water and a few pans of colour could make all the sea and sky, all the plants and stones, all the pots and pans and household things, seem real again on fragments of paper! She did not heed or even know that he was a man, young and handsome, whose eyes spoke a bold and amorous language; she was absorbed in his creations; he seemed to her the most marvellous of sorcerers. With delighted cries of recognition she welcomed the likeness of all the places and the objects so familiar to her; she was filled with a rapture of childish ecstasy. She hung over his work and watched him with a wonder which was only not awe, because it was such frank and childish delight.