Damaris was gathering oranges and carrying them to the packing-sheds.
She was bearing an empty skip upon her head, and kicking one of the
golden balls before her through the grass, when a woman, unlike any
woman that she had seen before, appeared to her astonished eyes amidst
the emerald foliage of the orange-boughs and the lilac of the hepaticas
which filled the grass.
'I am sure you know me again?' said the sweetest and coldest of voices.
'I am come to apologise to you for my rudeness. Here is Loswa, who is
afraid to approach you; he will vouch for me.'
Damaris stood still and mute; she put the basket off her head, and
looked in blank stupor at her visitant; her colour came and went
painfully; all in a moment she seemed to herself to grow ugly, awkward,
coarse, foolish, everything which was hideous and painful. She had no
words at her command, she might have been born dumb. No man had any
power to confuse her, but this beautiful woman paralysed her every
nerve.
'I am come to apologise to you for my involuntary rudeness,' said
her visitant in her sweetest manner. 'Your rebuke was apt and very
deserved, but you may be sure that, had I really seen you I should not
have incurred it.'
'It was I who was rude,' said Damaris, with her cheeks scarlet.
Loswa had been unable to embarrass her, but a cruel confusion
possessed her before this woman, who was so unlike herself, who was so
languid, so delicate, so marvellous.
'Not that she is so very beautiful either,' thought the child even in
her bewilderment. 'But she is--she is--wonderful! She is like those
gauze-winged dragon-flies, all silver and gossamer; she is like the
delicate white lilies of the tree datura; she is like, like----I did
not think a woman could be like that!'
'Do you forgive me?' said her visitor with her sweetest smile. 'I did
not really see you, or I should not have made such a blunder--I who
detest such mistakes.'
'I was rude,' stammered the girl again, with difficulty finding her
tongue, whilst her colour came and went with violence.
'Oh no, you were justly on the defensive. You were offended, and took a
just reprisal; the only one in your power. My dear child, M. Loswa has
shown me the sketch he made of you, and told me of your hospitality to
him. Will you not be as hospitable to me? I want much to make friends
with you.' The words were spoken with all the exquisite charm and
graciousness in which she could put such magic, when she chose, that
no one living would have resisted them, and all such little courage or
such vague prejudice as might have moved Damaris against her melted
before them like little snowflakes in spring before the sun amidst the
lilac-buds.
'If Madame will honour me,' she stammered, not even seeing the men
who were present, only thinking of her own rough gown, of her tumbled
hair, of the state of the house filled with wood smoke, as the oven was
getting ready for the baking; of the lines of washed linen that were
stretching from one wall to another.
'How did Clovis let you pass?' she said, struck with a sudden thought.
'Clovis knew me again,' said Loswa. 'Besides, a man was at the foot of
the _passerelle_, and brought us up to you.'
'He did not do his duty,' said the girl with a little frown, which drew
together her pencilled eyebrows.
'The man or the dog?' asked Nadine, amused.
'Neither,' said Damaris. She was angered, though she did not divine how
many napoleons had passed into Raphael's hand, who had been pruning
olives, and had had much trouble to hold back the faithful Clovis, for
whom gold had no charm.
'If Brunehildt had not been shut up with her puppies,' she added
regretfully; 'she is much more savage than Clovis.'
'You seem very sorrowful that we did not all have the fate of
Penelope's suitors,' said Nadine, much amused. 'We are the friends of
Monsignor Melville; may not that fact protect us? Is your grandfather
at home?'
No; he was away in the sloop; gone to St. Jean with a cargo. Damaris
did not add that he would have been much worse to pass than even
Brunehildt.
'But I pray you come into the house, Madame,' she added, her natural
courtesy gaining the ascendancy over her embarrassment. 'It is a poor
place, but there is a fine view, and if I had only known----'
'You would have been _endimanchée_ and hideous,' thought Nadine, as she
answered with her sweetest grace that she would go willingly to that
balcony of the beauties of which she had heard so much from Loswa.
'All her eyes are for me,' she whispered to Béthune. 'She does not see
that any of you exist.'
'I suppose,' rejoined Béthune, 'that we, after all, do not differ so
very much from Raphael and Gros Louis; but between a woman and a woman
of the world there is as much difference as between a raw egg and a
_soufflé_, between a hen and a peahen.'
'You might find a more poetic comparison; say a poppy and a gardenia,'
said Nadine smiling. 'She is not at the age to think of you. Have
patience; _ça viendra_. She is really very handsome, lovelier than
Loswa's sketch.'
Damaris, meanwhile, was thinking with agony that there were ready
no cakes, no cream, no white bread, nothing which this delicate and
ethereal visitant would be able to touch--thinking of the linen
swinging in the wind, and of the bacon grey with smoke, and of
Catherine, who, on washing-days, was in her crossest mood!
Nadine, with that swift intuition into, the thoughts of others which
made her the most sympathetic of companions where she deigned to be
sympathetic at all, guessed what was passing through the girl's mind,
and hastened to relieve her embarrassment by asking to be permitted to
remain out of doors, alleging that the air was so soft and the scent of
the orange-blossoms so sweet, that she was reluctant to leave either.
'Will Madame really prefer it?' said Damaris, unable to conceal her
relief.
'There is the same view to be seen from here,' she added as she opened
a door in the wall and showed them the southern sea stretching far
away, shining blue and violet through arches of olive-boughs lying all
hushed and bright and warm in the glow of the afternoon sun.
Then she caught a little boy by the shoulder, the son of Raphael, who
was looking on stupidly.
'Run and bring some wine and some fruit,' she whispered to him, 'and
ask Catherine to send the old silver.'
Her sense of the obligations of hospitality was stronger than the dread
of her great lady.
'It is not because she is great,' she told herself, angry with her own
timidity. 'But she is so wonderful, so wonderful!'
That supreme distinction in the wife of Othmar, which, when she walked
down a throne-room, made half the other women there look vulgar, had
its charm even for this child, who could not have given a name to the
superiority which awed and fascinated her, even whilst it made her
ready to hide her head beneath the stones like the lizards.
Nadine, pleased with everything, or so professing herself, sat on a
stone bench within sight of the sea and quartered a mandarin orange
with her white fingers, whilst the sun played on the jewels of her
great rings.
'Of all your many conquests, perhaps you have had none more flattering
than the adoration and amazement of this child,' whispered Béthune to
her.
She smiled.
'And I should not think,' she answered, 'that she was by nature easily
daunted or easily impressed. She has reigned here, the innocent Alcina
of a bucolic paradise. She has character, whether she have genius or
no. Look how coolly she puts poor Loswa aside! As he discovered Alcina,
it will be hard on him if he be not her Rinaldo!'
'You are kinder to him than to her,' said Béthune.
'You always think ill of him.'
'I think of his character much as I do of his art.'
'Surely his art is admirable?'
'It is clever; it is not sincere.'
'My dear Duke, is not that a little hypercritical? You mean that it is
a mannerism.'
'And what is a mannerism but an affectation? And what is an affectation
but a want of truth?'
'That is a wide subject. I cannot discuss it with you just now, because
I want to speak to this child.--My dear, I am a neighbour of yours; I
live on the coast which you see every day; will you come and stay a few
hours with me? We would show you things which would amuse you.'
'Stay with you?'
The eyes of Damaris opened to their fullest, her face flushed scarlet;
she was so amazed that she forgot her awe of the speaker.
'Why should you want me?' she said bluntly.
'When you are older you will know that people want many things without
knowing why they want them. But I can give you very good reasons:
Monsignor Melville has interested me in you, and I think it a pity
anyone so gifted as you are by nature should never see anything better
than your yard-dogs and--what is your _fiancé's_ name?--Gros Louis?
My poor child, how can you know what it is you do with yourself? You
cannot tell what the world is like.'
'I am very happy,' said Damaris.
The world was a name of magic to her. How often had she not looked
over the strip of sea which severed her from that dazzling shore where
amethystine hills and ivory snows and silvery olive woods spoke of a
world from which she was forever severed!
'I would come to you if I were ever alone,' she said after a pause.
'Well, come with us,' said her temptress smiling. 'It is three o'clock
only now. We will take you with us for a while and send you back by
twilight. Loris has told you who I am.'
The name of Othmar was, even to the ears of Damaris, a spell of might
upon those shores. She was flattered, amazed, touched to intense
emotion, but she stammered out that, although she was most grateful,
yet she dared not; her grandfather would kill her if she left the
island; he was most severe; he never forgave.
'I promise to disarm your grandfather if that is all your fear,' said
Nadine, as she thought to herself, 'These good Communists, _je les
connais_! They would string us all up to the lamp-posts, if they could,
and yet, when we speak to them, they are in heaven!'
The more terrified and resolute in resistance Damaris grew, the more
decided was her visitant to carry her point and succeed in her caprice.
'It is really cruel,' murmured Béthune. 'The child is happy: oh Madame!
why pluck this wild rose only to droop in your glass-house, and be good
for nothing ever afterwards? You cannot put it back upon its stem if
once you break it off----'
'Do you think to flower for Gros Louis's buttonhole is a better
fate?' said Nadine with amusement. 'I think you all are very hard to
please. Usually I never notice anybody, and you say I am cruel; when
I do notice anybody you say that is cruel also! I am just in the mood
to play at being a benefactress, and you all oppose my charitable
inclinations. To-morrow I may not be in the humour.'
'Precisely,' said Béthune. 'To-morrow you will wonder what you ever saw
in a hedge rose, but that will not put the rose back in bloom on the
hedge again.'
'The rose will cease to bloom certainly anywhere, and that is nature's
fault, and not mine.'
'I hear you love the old poets,' she said, turning to Damaris. 'Will
you recite something to me? I love them too.'
'And you yawn before every stage in Paris!' murmured Béthune. But
Damaris did not hear him.
'I shall say it very ill, Madame,' she murmured. She was diffident,
terrified indeed; yet her vague consciousness that she had some sort of
power in her, as the lark had, as the nightingale had, made the old
remembered poetry come thronging in her brain and trembling on her lips
as she spoke of it.
'If, after all, I have talent?' she thought, her heart seeming to beat
up to her throat.
'Give us something from Esther,' said her visitor; 'that is the one
play permissible to young girls.'
Damaris smiled, as if at the name of a dear friend. Those verses, which
generation after generation of children have spoken since the young
disciples of the early years of St. Cyr first wept over the perils of
the Jewish heroine, were amongst those which most touched her heart and
pleased her imagination. Unknown to herself, she had something of the
sense of loneliness of an exile, of an alien, on this little island,
which yet she loved so well.
'_Voyons, voyons!_' said Nadine impatiently, not accustomed to, or
tolerant of, being made to wait. 'Do not be afraid. I will tell you
frankly whether you have any artistic aptitude, or whether you had
better stay and gather oranges and never open a poem all your life.
These gentlemen will flatter you, but I shall not. _Voyons!_'
She spoke imperatively, and with the imperial air of her most resolute
will. Damaris grew very pale, even to her lips, but she did not dare
refuse to obey. She opened her mouth once, twice, with a deep-drawn,
fluttering, frightened breath; then she began to recite, with tremulous
voice, the
Notre ennemi cruel devant vous se déclare:
C'est lui, c'est le ministre infidèle et barbare
Qui, d'un zèle trompeur à vos yeux revêtu,
Contre notre innocence arma votre vertu.
Et quel autre, grand Dieu! qu'un Scythe impitoyable
Aurait de tant d'horreurs dicté l'ordre effroyable?
and passed on to the passage,
O Dieu, confonds l'audace et l'imposture!
At first her timidity was so great that she was almost inaudible, but
at the fifth and sixth lines the charm which the words possessed for
her began to absorb her thoughts, to take her out of herself into the
region of poetic feeling, to spur and stimulate and strengthen her.
Nature had given her tones full of tenderness and power, and capable
of many varying emotions, and the dramatic instinct, which was either
inherited or innate in her, made her give wholly unconsciously the just
expression, the true emphasis, the accent which best aided the meaning
of the verse, and best shaped its harmonies and grace.
Her first embarrassment once passed, the animation and spirit natural
to her returned; her intuitive perception made her lend the required
force and feeling to each verse; she could have recited the whole of
the play with ease, so familiar to her were the lines of all the few
volumes she possessed. Night after night, in her little balcony, when
everyone slept except herself and the nightingales, she had declaimed
the speeches _sotto voce_ for her own delight, living for the hour in
the scenes they suggested, and forgetting all the more sordid details
of the existence which surrounded her, seeing only the moon and the sea
and the orange flowers. At any other time her meridional accent, her
childish exaggeration of emphasis, and southerner's excess of gesture,
would have incurred the ridicule of her hypercritical auditor. But now
the critic was in the mood to be kind and to be easily pleased. She
closed her ears to the defects, and only noted with approbation the
much there was to praise and to approve in the untaught recitation of a
girl of fifteen, who had never seen a stage or heard a recital in the
whole of her short life.
Damaris paused abruptly, and with a startled look, like one awakened
out of dreamland into rough reality.
'I beg your pardon, I forgot myself,' she said stupidly, not well
knowing what she meant and hardly where she was.
She did not hear the eager praises of the gentlemen about her; she only
heard the sweet cool voice of the woman who was her judge, and who had
listened in impassive silence:
'My dear, you have talent,' said that voice. 'Perhaps you have even
genius. With all that music in your shut soul you must not marry Gros
Louis.'
Damaris looked at her wistfully, with all the colour hot in her face,
and her heart beating visibly. Then, she could not have told her why,
she burst into tears.
'_Une sensitive!_' murmured her visitant a little impatiently.
'You see, my dear Duke!--it is Aimée Desclée, not Rachel; Adrienne
Lecouvreur, not Mlle. Mars.'
'The greater pity then to take her from her orange-groves,' answered
Béthune. 'What will Paris or the world give that will compensate for
all her loss!'
Damaris did not hear. With shame at her own emotion, and unwillingness
that it should be pitied or observed, she had turned away, and had been
sobbing silently over the uplifted head and questioning face of Clovis,
who had come upward to inspect the strangers.
'If Esther can move her so greatly,' said Nadine with her little
ironical smile, 'what will Dona Sol do and Marion de l'Orme?'
'I do not think,' said Béthune, 'that it is Esther which moves her
now; it is your abrupt revelation to her of her own powers. Surely to
discover you have genius must be like discovering that you have a snake
in your breast and eternal life in your hand.'
She laughed, and went to where Damaris stood with the dog, striving to
conquer her weakness.
'My dear child, surely you cannot weep for Gros Louis? Nay, I
understand; I startled you because I told you that if you study and
strive you can do great things. I believe so. If you wish I will help
you to do them.'
The girl was silent. So immense was the vision which opened before her,
and so enormous to her fancy were the perils and difficulties which
stretched between her and this promised land, that she was mute from
awe and from amazement.
Always to dwell on Bonaventure, always to steer and sail on the sea,
always to gather the olives and oranges, always to see the sun rise
over the wild shores of Italy and set over the coast of Spain far
away in immeasurable golden distances, always to run up and down the
rocks like the goats, and swim like the dolphins, and go to bed with
the birds and get up with them--this had been the only life she had
known. For the moment she could attain no conception of any other. She
had seen the churches at Villefranche and Eza, and she had seen the
building yards of Villefranche and St. Tropez, and that was all; her
only idea of the great world was of a perpetual fête-day, with the
priests always in their broidered canonicals, and the church bells
always ringing, and the people always thronging in holiday attire, and
going up and down sunny streets noisily and laughing.
That was all she could think of; and yet Imagination, that kindliest
of all the ministers of humanity, had told her there must be more than
this somewhere; had filled her mind with many dim, gorgeous, marvellous
pageantries which grew up for her from the black printed lines of
'Sintram' and 'The Cid.' There must be something better than the
Sundays of the mainland---- And yet to leave her island seemed to her
like leaving life itself!
All these conflicting thoughts striving together in a mind which was
vivid in its fancies and childish in its ignorance moved her to an
emotion which she could neither have controlled nor have described; she
could find no words with which to answer this great lady, who seemed
to her to have thrown open great golden gates before her, and let in a
flood of light which dazzled her, streaming on her from unknown skies.
And at last she yielded.
'Catherine, I am going on the sea,' she cried, as she ran indoors,
blushing to the roots of her hair at the subterfuge, for she was very
truthful.
The old woman, invisible for the smoke as she stooped over the great
oven, with the handle of its door in her hand, grumbled some cross
words which were neither assent nor dissent. Damaris took them as the
former, and waited for no more; she passed half her life on the sea,
the old servant would find nothing strange in her absence if she were
out till sunset.
'You are sure I shall be back by Ave Maria?' she said timidly to her
temptress.
'Certainly,' said Nadine, who knew well that it was not possible.
'I am sure I ought not to come,' said the girl wistfully.
Her temptress smiled a little.
'Oh, my dear, if you be as feminine as you look, that consideration
will only add _la pointe à la sauce_.'
Damaris gazed at her with pathetic, impassioned eyes. She did not
understand; she said nothing; she only sighed.
'Come,' said the enchantress.
'I think Othmar was right. It is cruel,' murmured Béthune.
'Men are always so timid,' said Nadine with her customary indulgent
contempt for them. 'Ignorance is not bliss, my dear friend, although
the copybooks say so.--Come, my pretty demoiselle, come and see our
enchanted coasts; we will not harm you, and we will only give you a
little spray of moly such as Ulysses gathered; and perhaps a magic ring
and a wishing-cap, nothing worse.'
The child hesitated still; she knew that she was doing very wrong; she
knew that if what she was doing were discovered, her grandfather's
chastisement would be pitiless; but curiosity, imagination, interest,
were all enlisted on the side of disobedience, and she had a certain
turbulence and ardour of self-will in her nature which had brought
her many hard words from Catherine, and even blows from Jean Bérarde.
All these together conquered her conscience, her judgment, and her
prudence; the gates of the enchanted world stood open; she might never
pass through them, or see what was beyond them unless she went now.
With that reasoning she sprang down the first ledges of the stone
staircase, and as lightly as a kid would have done leaped from one step
to the other till she reached the edge of the sea.
She allowed her feet to be guided into the barge, and felt it dance
beneath them with a strange thrill; it seemed all to be as unreal
as a chapter of 'Sintram;' the lovely lady who wooed and tempted
her appeared like a being from another world; the gilded prow, the
embroidered flag, the rich awnings fringed with silver wavered before
her in the sunlight.
Before she had known what she had actually done, the oars of the men
cleft the sunshiny water, letting it flow in streams of diamonds off
their blades, and the vessel had already glided away from her home.
Clovis, who was accustomed never to leave the island, but never failed
to give voice to his grief when he saw her leave him for the sea,
either by swimming or sailing, stood on the strip of sand beneath the
rocky steep of Bonaventure and howled in dismal solitude. She put her
hands to her ears not to hear him; it seemed as if he reproached and
rebuked her.
Soon he became but a little white speck beneath the red sandstone of
the cliff, and the boat had reached the side of the stately schooner
which awaited them in the midst of gay sunshine and azure water, whilst
a flute-player discoursed sweet music from some unseen retreat.
When the island also began to recede from sight she then, and only
then, began to realise what she had done.
'_C'est Bernardin de St.-Pierre tout pur_,' said Nadine, surveying with
diversion the amazement and the awe of her captive.
Nothing could be more enchantingly kind than her manner, or more gentle
and encouraging in its patience with the girl's stupor and timidity.
She had gratified her caprice, she had won her wager, and she was
sweet and gracious to the object of it. Obedience had always found her
benignant if at times it had found her as quickly oblivious. This had
been a little thing indeed; a very little thing; but she would have
been irritated if it had escaped or beaten her; would almost have been
mortified.
All her world had told her that to bring the girl thither would be a
folly if not a cruelty; and for that reason beyond all others she had
persevered.
Damaris, seated in the prow of the barge, had the charm for her of
representing the triumph of her own will. So might some young slave,
hardly acquired, on whom her fancy had been strongly and waywardly set,
have represented hers to Cleopatra.