Yseulte de Valogne, waking the next morning and looking through the
little panes of her high window in the roof at the landscape which the
red leaves of the Canadian vine framed in crimson, was conscious of a
new interest in her life. Some one, she did not know whom, for in her
confusion she had not heard his name, had spoken to her with kindness,
and that deference to her incipient womanhood which is the sweetest
flattery to a very young girl. Othmar, with the grace of his manner,
the seriousness and coldness which made him different to the men of
his time, and his handsome features, to which an habitual reserve had
given that expression of self-control and of melancholy which most
attracts her sex, had seemed to her imagination like some gracious
knight of old bending to pity her loneliness, and to succour that
timidity which was in so much due to her pride and her unwillingness
to be regarded with compassion and to her dread lest she should seem
to seek attention.
She thought of him with a vague personal interest stronger than any
she had felt in her simple and monotonous life, since her childhood on
the Ile St. Louis had become to her like an old book of prayer, shut
up unused, with the lavender and southern-wood of long dead summers
faded and dried inside it. Though she was only sixteen, that childhood
seemed so far, so very far, away. It would have appeared to Blanchette
and Toinon, with their artificial, excited, _blasé_ little lives, a
dull and austere childhood enough, passed beside the infirmities and
incapacities of age, and with no other active pleasure than to gather
marguerites on the grass islands of the Seine or to hear a Magnificat
sung at Notre Dame.
The rooms they lived in had been narrow and dark, their food had been
of the simplest, their days regulated with exact and severe precision.
But she had been so happy! When her grandmother, with the white hair
like spun silk and the thin small hands, on which one great diamond
sparkled--sole relic of a splendid past--said, with a smile, 'C'est
bien fait, mon enfant,' all the universe could have added nothing to
her content.
When the old man servant Bénoît had taken her out to the Sainte
Chapelle, or the graves at the Abbaye, and had told her tales of how
her forefathers had died on the scaffold, in the _noyades_, on the
battle-fields of Jemappes, or in the slaughter of Quiberon, she had
known that purest of all pride, which rejoices in the honour and
loyalty of the dead who have begotten us. All the air about her had
been redolent of fidelity, of courage, of dignity. She had breathed in
that fine clear atmosphere of integrity as the transparent dianthus
drinks in the sea-water which the sunbeams pierce with vivifying gold.
When the Marquise had sometimes taken, out of old sandal-wood coffers,
antique brocades, dusky old jewels, faded yellow letters, perhaps a
ribbon and a star of some extinct order once worn at Marly or at
Amboise, the child had listened with reverent ear and beating heart to
the stories which went with the relics and keepsakes, and it had
always seemed to her as if some perfume of the past entered her very
veins, as its fragrance is poured upwards from the root into the
flower. Nor had it been always melancholy, that innocent, tranquil
life; gentlemen of the old courtly habits had made their bow humbly in
those narrow rooms, and the old _gaieté gauloise_ had laughed
sometimes beneath the sad serenity of losses nobly borne. There had
been merry days when Bénoît had taken her in one of the boats which
crossed the Seine in summer, and had rowed to one of those quiet nooks
of which he had the secret, and had landed with her amidst the tall
hay grasses, and had set her noonday meal there--a little fruit and
roll of bread--watching the poplars quiver in the light, and the women
work upon the shore, and the clumsy brown brigs come and go on the
broad breast of the river; and she had clasped a great sheaf of may
and daisies and kingcups in her arms, and had run hither and thither
in a very ecstasy of limbs set free and eyes delighted, and had cried
her delight aloud to the old man, who had nodded and smiled and said,
'Oui, oui, c'est beau,' but had thought, with a pang at his faithful
heart, 'Si jeunesse savait----.'
Then, whilst she was still a young child, there had fallen across her
life the darkness of the 'année terrible.' The Marquise de Creusac had
been at once too brave and too poor to quit Paris when the wall of
iron and of fire had closed in around it. Her sons had died, one at
the cavalry charge of Fræschweiler, the other during the siege of
Strasburg; she herself never rose from her bed during that ghastly
winter, and her last breath left her lips as the Prussians entered
Paris. The horror of that time could never wholly pass from the mind
of Yseulte. Bénoît had travelled with her to the château of Bois les
Rois, and placed her under the roof of her only living relative,
Aurore de Vannes, who herself was momentarily saddened and touched by
the misfortunes of the country and the loss of many of her kinsmen,
and in that chastened mood was kinder to the little friendless
fugitive than she might have been at another and less desperate time.
All that time seemed very far away to Yseulte now; to earliest youth,
a few years seems like the gap of a century.
Bénoît was dead now, like the mistress he had adored and served, with
that loyal service which, in this later time, one class has lost the
power to inspire and the other class has lost the capacity to render;
but those happy midsummer holidays on the islets of the Seine were
always in her mind whenever she felt the touch of the fresh air or
smelt the scent of growing leaves. They had spread a fragrance like
that of summer all over her memories of childhood. She pitied
Blanchette and Toinon, who cared nothing for daisies and kingcups; who
tired so soon of their costly playthings; who knew their Trouville and
Biarritz by heart, who, when they played at their games, were either
peevish or bored, and who looked with all the scorn of fashionable
eight-year-olders on a toilette which was a season out of date.
Blanchette and Toinon would die without ever having been young; their
cousin, who at sixteen was still entirely a child, had to die to the
world before she had begun to live.
She leaned out of her window in the chill of the early morning, and
she watched the sea mists curl up and drift away before the sun, the
mountains come forth slowly from the clouds obscuring them, the light
touch and reveal one by one the low white bastides, the grey olive
yards, the bosquets of orange and lemon, the fields where the young
corn already was spreading, the fantastic buildings which diversified
and vulgarised the beauty of the scene, and the grey towers of S.
Pharamond sober and severe amidst its ilex woods by contrast with the
coquetteries and motley phantasies of its neighbours.
'I wonder,' she thought for the hundredth time, 'if it were only
because he pitied me that he talked to me?'
She went on wondering who he was, what he was; she did not even know
that he owned S. Pharamond, and dared ask no one about him; all the
gay, thoughtless, inquisitive questions which youth loves to put,
whilst often too impatient to wait for an answer to them, had been too
perpetually frozen on her lips for silence not to have become a second
nature to her.
'What you can observe is well,' her grandmother had often said to her;
'it is the wheat you have gleaned, and you have a right to it. But
never gain knowledge by asking questions; it is the short cut across
the fields which only trespassers take.'
At the convent any interrogations which she had been tempted to make
had been repressed as too apposite to be convenient, and of the
Duchesse de Vannes she would have no more have asked a question or a
favour than she would have asked one of the lay figures on which the
Duchesse's marvellous costumes were built up, bit by bit, as idea
succeeded to idea in the brains of great artists of the toilette.
She had scarcely heard a dozen sentences from Madame Aurore in the
half-dozen years through which she had spent her summer vacations at
their great castle in the Vosges, a lonely place where she had usually
only the house-servants as companions; but in winter at Millo she had
been always happy, for near Millo dwelt her foster-mother, a
Savoyarde, who had become well-to-do since the time when, a poor young
unwedded mother astray on the mercy of Paris, she had been glad to
give her breast to the motherless child of the Comtesse de Valogne.
Through the influence and aid of the Marquise de Creusac the woman
Nicole had ultimately married her lover, a sturdy peasant of the
environs of Nice, and by thrift and hard work and good luck and good
husbandry combined, they now owned a bastide and an orange-orchard,
and could receive 'la petite Comtesse' with honey and cream and
conserves of their own manufactures. They had no children, and Mlle.
de Valogne still filled in the heart of her foster-mother the place
which had been empty and cold when a month-old baby had gasped out its
last breath of feeble life in a Paris hospital sixteen years before.
'What is the good of it all, the _pétiot_ is dead and gone?' said
Nicole Sandroz many a time, looking over her hives and hen-houses, her
rose-beds and her green peas, all blooming for the Paris market. But
this mood was transient; the _pétiot_ was not to be recalled by
regret, and the solid delight of early vegetables and their value
remained to her. She was a good woman, though hard in some ways and
greedy; but she was the only creature who gave Yseulte de Valogne
anything of the comfort of human affection and tender, blind,
unreasoning admiration. To Nicole 'mon enfant la Comtesse' was an
object of honest adoration, to be waited on, worshipped, petted,
slaved for if need be; and this wholly sincere, if clumsy, devotion
had always been to the starved heart of the girl as the one scrap of
moss on the frozen sea and shore is to the lonely and lost voyager.
When the dark, hard-featured face of the Niçoise presented itself at
the convent gates of Faïel, and with her load of oranges or
strawberries, of camellias or roses, she came out of the hot sun into
the quietness and dusk of the _parloir_ and stretched out her big
sturdy arms to her nursling, the proud eyes of Yseulte filled with
tears as no one else ever saw them do. She was a little child once
more clinging to her nurse's skirts in the old panelled rooms in the
Ile St. Louis.
The low white walls of the bastide were set upon a hill-side not
half-an-hour's walk from Millo, a fragrant, pleasant, homely place,
with violets cultured like corn, and roses grown like currant-bushes,
for the flower-shops of Paris and the purchase of the foreigners in
Nice. The mere presence of Nicole made her visits to the southern
shore longed for and enjoyed, and compensated to her for the fretful
teazing of her little cousins, the ill-concealed enmity of their
governesses, the perpetual sense of being undesired by any one there,
and the many slights which the indifference of her hosts made them
careless of inflicting. Aurore de Vannes would have said, if
remonstrated with, that the girl could want for nothing. She had two
pretty rooms all to herself, and a piano in one of them; had as many
gowns as she could wear, though, of course, at her age they were the
frocks of a _pensionnaire_; and could pass her time in the schoolroom
or in the gardens very much at her pleasure; she could even drive out
in the basket-carriage if Blanchette and Toinon did not want it. The
existence must, she would have argued, at any rate be very much
livelier than the convent.
In the first winter she had passed at Millo no one had come there but
herself, and she had spent her time almost wholly with her
foster-mother; later on, when the house was full--as it was now--she
obtained in her holidays a large amount of liberty, from the fact that
it was no one's especial duty to look after her. She used her freedom
innocently enough, and always took the path under the olives which led
to the flower-farm of the Sandroz.
Once the Duchesse had said to her irritably, 'What charm do you find
in peasants grubbing among peastalks and growing salad?' But she had
not waited for an answer, which was fortunate, as Yseulte would have
been too shy to give the true one,--that they loved her a little.
The Duchesse concluded that the governesses of her children did their
duty in attending on her young cousin. The governesses, however, were
willing that one who was only an extra charge to them should do as she
chose so long as she brought no trouble on themselves; few mornings
passed without her finding her way to the welcome of her old nurse, to
sit at pleasure under the shadow of the orange leaves, or drift
through clear water in the big market boat.
Madame de Vannes was, as the world in general would have said, very
generous to her; her education was of the best, the clothes provided
for her were elegant and suitable, her linen was of the finest, her
boots and shoes were the prettiest possible; the Duchesse did
everything well that she did at all; but beyond a remark that her hair
was too low or too high on her forehead, or that she did not wear the
right gloves with the right frock, Yseulte could scarcely recall
twenty phrases that she had heard from her august cousin. Now and then
the heart of the girl had risen in an impulse of ardour towards
liberty, towards independence. She was conscious of more talent than
the manner of her education had developed; in a vague way she
sometimes fancied the world might hold some place for her, some
freedom of effort or attainment; but all the habits of obedience made
a cage for her as surely as the laws made one. Her grandmother had
written with a hand half paralysed by death to commend her to the care
of her relative, and amongst her dying words the command: 'Obey Aurore
as you have obeyed me,' had been often repeated. Any thought of
rebellion was stifled by her sense of duty as soon as it arose.
This morning, as she leaned out of her window she could see the white
house of the Sandroz, half a league away, amongst the olive foliage,
and what was still more to her, the tiny bell tower of a little
whitewashed church, the parish church of S. Pharamond, in whose parish
Millo also lay. The one cracked bell sounding feebly for matins
recalled her to the present hour, and reminded her that the morrow
was the feast day of S. Cecilia to whom the building was dedicated.
'He will be so vexed if the altar be not dressed,' she thought. The
old priest of Millo was accustomed to look to her for that service.
The Duchesse always gave him two thousand francs in gold for his poor
at New Year, but there her heed of her vicar ended. Yseulte, who had
no gold to give, brought him flowers and boughs for his little, dusky,
lonely place, where only a few fishermen and peasants ever knelt, and
she sometimes sang at his Offices.
When she remembered the day, she wasted no more time at the window;
she drank the cup of milk and ate the roll which the maid appointed to
her service brought, and putting on a little hat of fur, went out
through the house where even Blanchette and Toinon were still asleep,
and only a few of the under servants were stirring.
It was cold, but already grown bright, with sunshine, and the promise
of a warm noonday.
The gardens of Millo, with their autumn luxuriance still prolonged,
were sparkling with sunbeams and dew-drops; their aloes and cacti
pierced with broad sword-blades the blue clear air; the latest roses
kissed the earliest camellias; the pink, the amber, the white, the
purple, of groves of chrysanthemums, glowed in the parterres; but she
did not dare to give them even a glance. No one ever plucked a flower
there.
She went quickly through the alleys, and avenues, over the lawns, and
under the _berceaux_, and after walking about a mile came to where the
boundary of Millo was fixed by a high wall of closely-clipped arbutus,
and only the small iron gate which Othmar had unlocked the previous
night gave access to the lands of S. Pharamond, which lay beyond.
'There will be sure to be something here,' she thought, as she turned
the latch of the gate which he had unthinkingly left open, and passed
through the aperture into the thick ilex wood on the other side of the
bearberry wall. She was not surprised to find it open, for the
gardeners of the two houses often held communication; and she had been
constantly permitted by those of S. Pharamond to wander about its
grounds and pluck its commoner plants. It was a thing she had done a
hundred times in the winters she had passed at Millo.
There were all kinds of plants growing up at Nicole's bastide; but as
she had no money to pay, the child had always felt a delicacy in
asking, for them. Her foster-mother would indeed have refused her
nothing; but to take as a gift the late-come _quatre-saisons_ rose, or
the early-blooming _clochettes_, which the Sandroz could sell so
highly by sending them away in little air-tight tin boxes to Paris,
would have appeared to the generous temper of the last of the Valognes
a very ungenerous act.
Othmar, who had slept ill, rose early that day. When he had bathed and
dressed, he strolled out on to his terrace, where Nadine Napraxine had
eaten her strawberries. Though winter, the morning was mild, the
sunrise glorious. Through the great gloom of his ilex groves he could
see the sparkle of blue waves. It was not the scenery he cared most
for; he liked the great windy shadowy plains of eastern Europe, the
snow of mountains more sombre and severe than these hyacinth-hued
maritime Alps, the gigantic grey walls of Atlantic rollers breaking on
rugged rocks of Spain, or Britanny, or Scotland; but he was not
insensible to the present beauty which surrounded him, if it were
brighter and paler of hue, gayer of tone, softer in character, than
the scenes he preferred.
He stood and looked idly, and thinking, 'If I were wise I should go to
Paris this morning.'
What was the use of letting all his years languish and drift aimlessly
away for sake of a woman who made sport of his pain? Yonder, hidden by
the curve of a distant cliff, was La Jacquemerille, and its mistress
of the moment was, no doubt, sleeping soundly enough amongst the lace
and cambric and satin of her bed, and would not have lain awake one
moment thinking of him, though he had thought of her all night.
'Were people ever sleepless for love?' she had said once, with her
pretty cynical smile. 'That must have been very long ago, before the
chemists had given us chloral!'
As he stood and thus made his picture of her in his mind sleeping, as
the narcissus which she resembled sleeps in the moonlight, he saw a
figure underneath the ilex boughs which was not hers, but had a grace
of its own, though wholly unlike her.
It was the figure of a girl in a grey close dress which defined the
outline of her tall slim limbs. She wore a fur hat, and had some fur
about her shoulders; the sunbeams of the early day touched the gold in
her hair and shone in her hazel eyes. She was gathering now one
datura, now another, of those spared by the December mistral, and
coming up to a bed of camellias, paused doubtfully before their
blossoms; she came there like one accustomed to the place, and who
merely did what she had often done before. Her grey gown, her sunny
hair under its crown of sable, her hands filled with flowers, made a
picture underneath the palms, amidst the statues, against the ilex
darkness.
He recognised the child whom he had last seen in her white gown with
the black sash a few hours before in the Duchesse's drawing-rooms.
For the moment, he put on her appearance there that construction which
a man, subject from his boyhood to the advances and solicitations of
the other sex, was most apt to conceive of such an unsought visit. But
as he saw how unconcerned, natural, and childlike her movements were
as she paused, now by this shrub and now by that, or sat down on a
bench to arrange some asters in her basket, he as rapidly discarded
his suspicions and guessed the truth, that she had been ignorant of
who he was the previous evening, and had come to his gardens by chance
or by custom.
As he hesitated whether to descend and make her welcome, or to retreat
unseen into the house and tell his servants to say nothing, she looked
up and saw him. She dropped her flowers on the grass, and turned to
run away like any startled nymph in classic verse, but he was too
quick for her; he had descended the few steps from his terrace and had
approached her before she could fly from him.
'Do not be so unkind to me,' he said, with deference and courtesy, for
he divined how ashamed she was to have been found there. 'There is
little in these gardens after being swept by the mistral, which is a
cruel horticulturist, but the hothouses, I hope, may give you
something worthier your acceptance.'
'I beg your pardon,' she murmured, 'there has been no one here so
long----'
He had spoken as though her presence was the most natural thing in the
world, but neither his composed acceptance of it or his courteous
welcome could reconcile her to the position she occupied. She coloured
painfully, and her breath came and went in an agitation she could not
subdue.
'I beg your pardon,' she stammered again; 'I did not know--last night
I did not hear your name--there has been no one here so long. Oh, what
can you think of me!'
Her eyes were filled with sudden tears; her colour faded as suddenly
as it had come. She was only a child, and had been reared by stern
formalities and by chill precepts.
'Think?' echoed Othmar; 'that you are kind enough to treat me as a
neighbour. Neighbours are not always friends, but I hope we shall be
so. That little gate has no use in it unless it be an open portal for
friendship to pass to and fro; I walked through it to Millo last
night.'
But his good nature and gentleness could not avail to console her for
what was in her own eyes, as it would have been in that of her
relatives, an unpardonable and infamous misdemeanour. Now that she
recognised in the speaker the same person whom her cousin had
presented to her the previous evening, she longed for the lawn she
stood on to open and cover her. A piteous dismay took possession of
her; would he ever believe that she had not known him as the owner of
S. Pharamond? Would he ever believe that S. Pharamond had been that
morning, as far as her knowledge had gone, still unoccupied as it had
been for ten mortal years?
All the lessons of her convent life made her act appear in her own
eyes one of inexcusable audacity, unspeakable horror,--to have come
into the gardens of a stranger when he was himself there to take his
flowers!
The kindness of his gaze and the cordiality of his welcome could do
nothing to console her; she was barely conscious of them; the colour
in her face mounted to the loose curls escaping from her little fur
cap; she laid her basket down and joined her hands in an unconscious
supplication.
'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 inadvertently 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.