by Ouida
‘It was very brave to say the truth. You shall tell me all that happened from it on another day. I can never forgive myself for all the misery which my wife’s thoughtless invitation has entailed on you. Let me do my best to atone for it.’
Then he bowed low with unfeigned reverence, and left her. What was so worthy of reverence as so much innocence, as so much courage?
She drew a long sigh, and her eyes closed. She was tired with the exhausted sense of failing powers which the feebleness of illness causes after every slight exertion. But his visit had left on her a deep, sweet sense of serenity and safety.
‘How good and great he is!’ she said dreamily to the nun, as the door closed on him.
The pious woman did not reply. Othmar was not her idea of human excellence. He went to no church, and he supported no religious institutions. Besides, as she thought to herself, who could tell what motives he had in taking this handsome child off the streets? It was not her business to speak; her superiors had sent her there, and had said to her: ‘Nurse the girl, and say nothing.’ But the Sister had not gone on her many errands of mercy for a score of years in all the quarters of Paris, good and bad, rich and poor, without knowing the meaning of human vices. She began to convey vague warnings, and cite praiseworthy examples of temptation resisted and overcome to her patient. Her voice went on and on unanswered, like the flowing of a slothful brook, and when at last she looked up from her embroidery, Damaris was asleep upon her couch, the last red reflection from the sun, which had set beyond the trees of the gardens, tinging her face with its warmth, and her hair with its light. For the first time since she had been brought there her expression, as she slept, was one of peace.
But soon she woke again, startled and distressed. The tears sprang to her eyes; she pressed her hands together in passionate agitation.
‘I spoke so badly!’ she said, in great contrition. ‘I said such poor weak words! He will never know all I feel. He will only think me ungrateful!’
‘Tut, tut!’ said the nun roughly. ‘Take your gratitude to God, not man!’
CHAPTER XXIV.
The following day he sent to ask if she would receive him again; it seemed to him that not to do so would be to appear to neglect her. He did not misconstrue her few embarrassed words or deem her thankless; he had that intuition into the minds of others which minds sensitive themselves possess; he understood all the conflicting emotions which had agitated her, all the vast weight of gratitude which held her dumb and made her almost mute, almost awkward in his presence. He paid her a brief visit four or five times in that week, then was absent himself at Amyôt for a few days. On his return he saw her again, and she seemed to have gained greatly in strength. She could sit erect; her face had the hues of returned health, and her eyes met his with the candour and brightness which were natural to her regard. She was a child still, and she had so much trust in him that it supplied to her the place of friends and home.
If the memory of the great lady who had tempted her and ridiculed her, and who was his wife, had not been too constantly before her, she would have been almost happy again. But for her she had a sombre antagonism, a curious sentiment, half defiance, half fear. Othmar never pressed her to tell him more or sooner than she wished of all the circumstances which had led to his discovery of her on the bridge; but one day when he found her nearly well, standing by the open windows with the breeze lifting the short thick waves of her hair, and her eyes looking wistfully across the trees at the domes and roofs of Paris, she turned and caught his hand in hers and laid her lips on it.
‘What can I do? How can I thank you? A very dog could do something to show you his gratitude, and I — I can do nothing.’
‘You have rewarded me by getting well,’ said Othmar kindly and lightly, to avoid the expression of any stronger emotions, ‘and you can reward me more greatly if you will tell me everything that has befallen you since I took you home that night. Will you?’
‘It will not tire you?’
‘It will interest me greatly.’
She sat down, the full afternoon sun falling on her face as it was upraised to him, her hands locked in her lap, her face pensive and grave with many memories.
‘When I told him the truth that night,’ she began, ‘he hurt me a good deal, but more in my heart than in my body. I suppose he did not believe that I had done nothing wrong; anyhow, in going to your house I had disobeyed him. In the morning he took me to the mainland and my clothes with me, and without speaking ever a word, drove me in different vehicles up, up, up into the interior where the hills were, and placed me in a convent of Benedictine nuns up in the mountains above Val de Nieve. There he left me without saying a word to me, though I suppose he explained things to the Sisters. Perhaps he told them I was wicked, for they were very harsh to me, and their discipline was very severe. It was exceedingly cold there after the island, which you know is so warm, and for months there was snow all around, nothing but snow. I felt like a chained dog, and I fretted and raged, and they punished me. It was very miserable. Twice I tried to run away, but they prevented me. Then the better weather came and the very mountains grew green and bore flowers. This gave me a kind of hopefulness, and there were a number of little children in the convent, and I played with them and became less wretched, and I learned many things, for the Sisters were instructed women and taught well, and I had always been fond of books and eager to read them. But how I longed for the sea, and to feel a boat bound under me, and go as I chose it to go! You see I had always been in the open air and on the open sea at my fancy, and that is no doubt why I felt like a chained dog in these stone chambers, with their iron bars and their windows so high that one could only see a hand’s-breadth of sky. Why do people live so when there is the air and the earth and the water? I was there half a year, or rather more. Then in the month of October my grandfather came, just before the passes in the mountains were closed with snow, and took me back to Bonaventure.’
Her eyes closed a moment as if to keep in unshed tears. Then she resumed her story.
‘He never addressed me except just about things which he could not help, and we crossed the sea and landed at the dear island, and I thought the dogs would have gone mad with joy. Catherine had died whilst I was at the convent, and he had never allowed me to be told. That she should have died in my absence was a great pain to me, because I had known her all my life, and she had been often kind and good though her temper was cross, above all on washing and baking days. But now she was gone, poor soul! Everything else, however, was as I had always known it, and I was so happy to be home I could have kissed all the inanimate things! The goats knew me, too, and one of the hens flew to my shoulder directly. My grandfather let me do whatever I liked all that day, but he never spoke once except to bid me eat and drink. When it was night and I was about to go to bed, for I felt tired, he took me out under the orange-trees; it was a fine night and the air very light and clear, and there was a moon then coming up above the edge of the sea. There he said to me that if I would marry my cousin he would give me the whole island all for my own, and to my cousin the brig and all the money that was saved, and he himself would only keep a room or two and enough for his wants, and my cousin was to take the name of Bérarde. I thanked him, but I said I would not marry my cousin. I might have done if your Lady had never come to me that day, perhaps; I do not know. I said a score of times that I would not; each time I was more resolved than before. Then my grandfather grew like a madman and cursed me horribly, and told me that I had no claim on him; that my father had never married my mother, that the law would allot me nothing. I do not very well understand how, but it seems that I had no legal right there, and that all he had done for me he had done to please my uncle Jules, the one who died of cholera, who had loved my father and so loved me. Now, perhaps, as all my life had been a burden to him and a debt, I ought to have obeyed him and married Louis Roze. Do you think so?’
‘No,’ said Othmar, with some vehemence. ‘No; such a marri
age would have been a blasphemy!’
‘I did not stay to think, I did not want to think. I said no — no — no — a thousand times no! And then I thought he would have beaten me as he beat me the night you took me home.’
‘Beat you? Good God!’
‘He had beaten me before when he was in drink, never at any other time. This night he had not drunk. He was quite sober, but he became mad with rage; it was always so with him at any opposition, and he had thought that I should be dull and tame, having been so long in the convent. But I was not. I told him that I would obey him and work for him as long as he lived, because I owed him everything I had ever owned or enjoyed; that I would be his servant, and till the ground, and sail the boat, and fish in the sea, and cut wood, and do all that Raphael did; but that I would never marry my cousin or anyone else. Never — never. So I told him as we stood under the moon together.’
‘But, before we saw you, you were willing to make this marriage?’
Damaris coloured more.
‘I had never thought about it before then. My grandfather said it was to be. It was to me as when he said so many thousand oranges were to be packed, or so many barrels of oil sent to the mainland. I never thought about it. But after — after I had seen your wife, and your house, and your friends, then, I do not know why, but everything seemed different.’
If his wife had not gone to the island in that hour of caprice, this child would no doubt have accepted the fate prepared for her, and passed her life as so many other women did, mated to a boor but reconciled by habit to uncongenial companionship, putting aside her dreams with the orange-flowers of her bridal clothes, and learning to think only of the gold pieces in the bank, the yield of the oil-presses, the price of fish and of fruit, the growth of the children that with each year came to birth. Would it not have been better? Common sense and vulgar prudence would say yes, he knew, but in his inmost soul he could not say it. Besides, revolt might have come, disgust, the desire for wider worlds and higher thoughts and warmer passions.
With her luminous eyes and her poet’s thoughts she would have never been contented long with the narrow, coarse, dull ways of such a life as would have been hers had she yielded.
‘Poor child!’ thought Othmar, with a pang of almost personal repentance.
Nadège had done many things which were as so much mere thistle-down on the wind in her own eyes, but which had sown dragon’s teeth in the paths of others. But it seemed to him that she had never done a more unkind or a more wanton act than when, on the spur of an idle moment’s caprice, she had tempted this innocent Alcina from her happy island of content.
Damaris did not say so, but he himself had haunted her dreams ever since that night’s sail over the moonlit sea.
This man, with his gentle courtesies, his low soft voice, his tender care and compassion for her, his high romantic sense of honour which had made him counsel her to tell the truth, cost what it would, seemed to her a being of another world than that to which her grandfather and her affianced lord belonged.
She had thought of little else but Othmar ever since he had left her on that shore in the soft-tinted shadow, where the light of daybreak crossed the last rays of the moon. It was not love which she felt; he was too far away from her, too impersonal, too great for her to think of him with any personal thoughts; but it was an idealised admiration, a keenly grateful remembrance, a vague, unconscious sympathy, which had filled her mind with his image in the many lonely hours she had passed since that night, and the remembrance of him had made her shrink from the possible contact, from the mere thought of her cousin, with a disgust and a revolt which had made her as unmoved as the rocks of her island itself, before the rage of her tyrant and the threats of his blind passion.
A thousand times better death, she had said to herself — death under the blue waters on the deep sea bottom of her native gulf; death and peace and silence amongst the broad green weed and the jewelled fishes and the white coral branches which she had seen so often, fathoms down below her, as she had leaned over the boat’s side and gazed through the pellucid water clear as a mirror to her eyes.
Startled, she was recalled to the present by the voice of Othmar, as he asked her to continue her narrative.
‘I thought I was on the island!’ she said with a sigh.
‘Would you like to go back there?’ he asked. A vague, wild fancy came to him of buying back her lost paradise for her at any cost. She hesitated.
‘It would not be the same,’ she said at last. ‘I should not be the same, you know. But sometimes I want the sea so much! I want the sight of it, the scent of it, the feel of the wind from it blowing on my face! He was very cruel, but, I suppose, he could not help it. He was disappointed in me, and that made him very hard. When he found that he could not force me to marry my cousin he became quite mad. He took me down to the water, and put me in one of the small boats, and he told me to go, just as I was, with nothing but the clothes I had on and the gold cross Monsignor gave me at my first communion, which I always wore at my throat, and a few trinkets which had belonged to my mother. He ordered me to row away or he would fire upon me.’
‘Good God, what a brute!’ cried Othmar.
‘I am sure he did not intend to really hurt me,’ she said earnestly. ‘I am sure he only meant to frighten me, and thought I should go back to him and do what he wished me to do. He never supposed, I dare say, that I should take him at his word and go.’
‘Few of your age and sex would have had the courage to do so.’
A look of contempt passed over her face.
‘I would have given myself to the sharks sooner than return and give in. One must be a very weak creature to be driven like that.’
‘Why did you not come to us?’
‘I could not have done that.’
‘Why? We were absent, but if you had gone to the house there and written to me — or to my wife.’
‘No. I could not have done that. When I was there I was a burden to her. Besides, you had no right to do anything for me. You were a stranger.’
‘I had the right I have now — that of a friend. You were ill treated in my house, that I know, but it was no fault of mine.’
‘It was no one’s fault. Only my own, for being foolish enough to go there. But let me tell you the rest as quickly as I can, or you will be tired — —’
The colour rose over her face, and her voice grew lower, and her words more rapid as she hastened on the course of her narrative.
‘I knew he would do as he said, for he stood above with his musket levelled downward at me. I took up the oars and I rowed away from the island, steering with my foot. I felt quite stunned; I did not think of resisting: when once he said I was nothing to him, and ought not really to bear his name, I did not feel as if I had any business there ever any more. Only I could not understand it, because after all he said that I was his son’s child; and I have been all the days of my life on the island, and I thought my heart would break. Well — I got into the boat. It was quite light because the moon was now at the full. The sea was still. I did not feel in any way afraid. Yet I had never felt the sea so solitary as it seemed that night. Far away there were the lights of steamers moving steadily. I could smell the smell from the orange trees for a long, long while, and the last sound I heard from home was the cry of Clovis. He was howling because I was gone — —’
Tears choked her voice; but she only paused a moment.
‘Of course,’ she continued, ‘I had never been alone at sea in the night time before. One feels so small, so weak, so very lonely, all by oneself between the water and the sky. I was afraid, but I was not frightened. Do you know what I mean? I mean that I was not a coward, but I felt very near death. The boat was so small, and the sea was so large. It had never seemed so large to me before. Well, I could steer by this compass you gave me, which I had never let anyone see lest they should take it; and the wind was southerly and drove me northward.
‘After many hours, and w
hen my arms were very tired, and the day was breaking, I came to the coast.
‘I landed at St. Jean; no one saw me land, and I avoided the fisher-people whom I knew there, because I could not bear to tell them how my grandfather had dealt with me. There were a few of them on the beach, getting their cobles ready to go out, but it was only dawn, and I did not let the few there were astir see me. I left the boat tied to some piles and went inland. I have never seen the sea since! — —’
There was a great regret and longing in her voice.
‘I did not like to stop anywhere on the coast, for there were many people there who knew me; and I was sure they would ask me so many questions. I drank some water at a well; I was not hungry. I dare say you will wonder that I did not feel afraid, but I did not. I went out of the town on the northern road; I wished to get to Grasse and so to Paris.
‘I had not gone very far before I met a Brigasque woman mounted on a mule. I knew her as a friend of Catherine’s. She was well-to-do, and owned a flower-farm not far from St. Dalmas de Tende; she grew common plants for the perfume distillers of Grasse. She thought I had run away from the island, and I let her think so; and as she hated my grandfather, because he had outbidden her years before at the sale by auction of some acres of land in the Roya valley, she offered me to go home with her and work for her amongst the flowers. As I did not know what to do or where to sleep I accepted her offer, and she hired a mule for me at the next inn we came to, and so I rode with her into the Brigasque country, which I did not know at all, but which I found was very pretty and had more trees in it than usual. I stayed with her all the winter, helping her in what ways that I could.
‘I passed the winter there, for I knew I must not go to Paris without some little money at least. One day in the new year there came by a pedlar whom I knew; we had bought little objects of him once or twice, when Catherine and I had been at St. Jean at the same time as he. He recognised me at once and roughly called me a fool, for he said that my grandfather had died of apoplexy straining at the oil-press one day, in place of a bullock which had dropped at the work. He called me a fool, because he said if I had not run away I should have now inherited the island and all he had, whereas it was now left unconditionally to Louis Roze. I did not tell him that I had not run away.’