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 marriage 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 when 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.'
'In what little things,' thought Othmar as he listened, 'a high
and generous nature shows itself, quite unwitting how it innocently
displays its own fine instincts!'
'Did you not tell him of your wrongs then?' he asked aloud.
'Oh no: not when my grandfather was dead and could not defend himself!
To me it was the end of all hope. I had hoped that one day I should go
home. I had always thought he would relent and seek me out; it made
me miserable to think that he should have said such cruel words to me
for the last words, and he had certainly been good to me, very good in
his way. He could not be very gentle, it was not in him; but he had
been generous to me, and sometimes kind and quite proud of me too.
I was very sorry, because when a person is dead, you know, one only
remembers what was good in them, and one wants so much to say so many,
many things to them; but now I knew that this could never be, and I
was very wretched. The pedlar had said that everything was given to
my cousin, but the people I was with would not believe it. They got a
letter written to my cousin, and asked for my share (unknown to me; I
would not have let them do it had I known). Louis Roze wrote back to
them that I inherited nothing under the will, and had no legal claim to
insist on any division of the property; he said he was about to marry
a young woman of St. Tropez, and he sent me a bank note for a thousand
francs. I sealed it up and sent it back to him. You know he knew that
all the island would have been mine. I care nothing for the money, but
I love the island; I love every stick and stone upon it, every shell on
its sand, every wave that breaks on its rocks!'
'You shall have your island again, if money can buy it!' thought
Othmar, with one of those heedless impulses of generosity which had
more than once cost him dear.
'I was so unhappy to think my grandfather was dead, and dead with
rage in his heart against me, that for weeks I could do nothing,' she
pursued, while the tears rolled off her lashes. 'But then I felt that
there was no one on earth to do anything for me if I did not do it
for myself, and I worked hard to get together money enough to take me
to Paris, and keep me there a little while. They all said that life
there was very dear, and money ran like water. You see I was always
thinking of what your Lady had said, about my having some talent in me.
I thought of it all day long as I worked in the rose-fields and among
the great thickets of jessamine. Your Lady had said that I might be
great some day, and it is always to Paris that people go who wish to be
great, at least all the books say so. Watteau went, and Molière, and
Rousseau, and Napoleon, and ever so many others----'
'Ah, poison of the world!' thought Othmar. 'What cruelty we did! She
would have stayed on her island and been the mother of little brown
children, and known nothing of the world but its fresh honest sea and
its frank, bold winds! What a pity! What a pity! The rattlesnake is
kinder than such dreams of fame!'
He was sorry and troubled, and angered against his wife, who had cast
the stone of worldly desire into the limpid, calm waters of this young
child's thoughts.
He was unspeakably saddened by the vision of her, coming northward over
the sandy roads of Provence, with so much hope and fancy in her heart,
only to drop sick with hunger upon the stones of Paris--Paris, so fair
a mistress to the rich, so hard a stepmother to the poor. Gilbert, and
Hégésippe Moreau, and Meryon, and how many others, had traversed that
path before her, only to perish in the hospital or the garret, mad or
famished, clutching at the bough of laurel, obtaining only the hemlock
of death!
'So I determined to leave St. Dalmas,' she continued, 'and walk all the
way to Grasse when the March weather came. On the roads I assure you I
did quite well. People were very kind whilst I was in my own country,
as it were. At the bastides and the cottages they let me sleep well
and gave me food, and let me do work in return. I know how to do many
things that are of use on the farms, but of no use at all in Paris.
So little by little I did get to Grasse, and there one of the women
who knew my Brigasque friends gave me welcome, because some of them
had given me a letter to her asking her to be kind. But I shall weary
you; I will try to tell the rest shortly. I could have stayed on at
Grasse as long as I would, but I wanted to get to Paris; above all, now
that my grandfather was dead, there was nothing to keep me in my own
country; no one wanted me or sought for me. They had paid me a little
for what I did in the Brigasque country, and I saved up all of it, and
when I had enough to pay for the railway to take me there (it is very
dear indeed), I bade them farewell and took the train to Paris. I had
never travelled by land before, only on the dear sea. It is horrible
to have all that fire in that great iron pot swinging one to and fro,
while it yells and bellows through the heat and the air that is not
like air at all but only so much smoke. How Fénelon would have hated
it; it would have seemed to him like hell! Why do men travel in such
a way when there are the tree-shadowed roads and the rivers? I had
taken my passage (do they call it so?) straightway to Paris, and there
were many changes and many pauses and great confusion, and the noise
and the heat and the strangeness made me feel unwell. I had never felt
ill before, that I remember. It was a very great many hours, even days
I think, before we reached Paris; it was night, and it was raining;
nothing was at all like what I had pictured it. There were crowds and
crowds of people, but no one noticed me. I felt lonely, and I missed
the sea and the sweet fresh smell that is anywhere where the country
is. Here the air felt so thick and so greasy, and the rain had no
pleasantness in it; it was not clean and fragrant, as it is when it
scours over the fields or patters through the orange-leaves at home.
As I came out of the station a young man looked into my face and was
insolent. I struck him a blow on his cheek with all my might; I hurt
him; the people wanted to seize me, but I was quicker than they, and
I ran, and ran, and ran until I outstripped them, and then I was in a
narrow, dark street, and sat down on a doorstep and wondered where I
ought to go. I had only three gold pieces with me in a belt round my
waist, and I knew they would not last long. I had spent almost as much
as that for the train and in food at the places the train waited at;
the food was very dear and very bad, even the bread.
'Some women went by and spoke to me, but I did not like their words,
and I answered nothing, but got up and looked about me for a place
to sleep in. I was wet through, for it rained a great deal. I saw a
little place which seemed like a restaurant, and I went in and asked
if I could have a room there. They gave me one, a very little one, and
not clean, and I went to bed without eating, being afraid to spend the
little I had.
'When I got up in the morning and went to pay for my chamber and
supper, I found that I had no money at all. My belt was gone. I suppose
I had been so sound asleep that I never heard them come into my room
and take it. I always think it was the woman of the house who stole it,
because I had shown her the napoleons. She raved and abused me when I
told her my money had been stolen, and said her house had always been
honest. She denied that she had ever seen the belt, and swore that I
should pay for all I had or go to prison. I told her that it was she
was the thief, not I. I threw her my little gold cross to pay her, and
went out of her house into the streets. I think she was a wicked woman.'
'Wicked, indeed,' said Othmar, whilst he thought, 'it is heaven's mercy
that she did not do worse to you.'
He, by whom all the hideous vice of the great city was known, all its
grasping greed, its hunger for gold, its remorseless seizure of all
ignorance, and innocence, and pleasant rural things, and virgin beauty
of the body and the mind, knew that by a miracle scarce less than
that which in legend bears the royal saint of Alsace unharmed through
the flames had this child escaped pollution in the heart of Paris.
Corruption had been all around her, and the morass of iniquity upon
every side; her own sex were for ever on the watch for such as she, to
sell their youth into the slavery of the brothel, and she had known no
more the peril which she ran than the wild dove does when its flying
shadow passes over the trap hung below it in the oak-boughs.
'I asked in a great many places for such work as I knew how to do,
but nobody wanted any of it done. There seemed such numbers of people
everywhere clutching at every little bit of work. Many laughed at me: I
saw my clothes were different to what they wore in Paris, and my accent
was different too to theirs. But they were cruel to laugh. I went to
the theatres and tried to see the directors, but no one of them would
even see me. All these days I lived on the little money I had gained
by selling my great cloak: it was such warm weather I did not want it.
I had made acquaintance with a good woman who was very poor herself,
but she told me what to do and where to go, and let me sleep in her one
little attic; she had three children, quite little ones, and she worked
in a match factory. She lives in a little passage up at Montmartre.
Of course I had to make her think I ate all I wanted out of doors or
she would have robbed herself for me, poor though she was. I had a
friend in her, but when I had been with her three weeks, there was a
noisy mob which assembled near, and screamed for bread, and broke open
the bakers' shops and stole the loaves. She was coming home from the
factory, and was arrested as one of the rioters, though I am sure she
had been merely passing down the street, and the little children had no
one but me for a little while. I did what I could for them until their
grandmother came up from some village outside the barrier and took them
away, and I missed them very much.
'I would rather not talk about the days that came after that dreadful
morning,' she pursued, the wavering colour fading wholly from her face,
for the recollection of them was unbearable to her. 'It is only three
months ago since I came to Paris, but it seems as if it were years.
I saw and heard things that I could never tell anyone, they were so
horrible. I sold all I had of clothes, it was very little. I lived as
I could, I was very hungry all the time, but I did not mind that so
much as I minded the squalor, the noise, the crowds, the filthy smells,
the horrible language. I tried to get work, but I could not. I went to
the theatre doors, but the porters would not let me in. I did not know
what to do; even my linen was sold. I sold even my shoes, and people
give you so little when they know that you want much. I could not get
any work of any kind. I was of use on my island, but not here; and the
men jeered at me and were rude--and--and--there is nothing more to tell
that I know. I could make no money at all, and so of late I could get
no food, and the night I fell down on the bridge I was faint and very
unhappy, for they had turned me out of the woman's room because she
did not come back, and I had no money to pay for keeping it. But that
is enough about me. I met you on the bridge. You know the rest. I had
not eaten anything all the day, I suppose that was why I fainted. I
never fainted in my life before. It is only three months since I left
Grasse, but it seems so many years--so many years! Is this the world
indeed that the Comtesse Othmar spoke of? Surely it cannot be--it is
cruel, it is hideous, it is hateful--if I could only see the sea or the
country once more! You have been very good to me. I pray you to help me
to gain my own living somehow, only not in this city--pray not here! I
am stifled in it. I want the air. Pray help me!'
Othmar was silent from emotion. It seemed unutterably cruel to him
that this child should have been led into such perils, such pain, such
want, by one careless word of his wife's, and he, who all his life long
had had about him everything that luxury can invent and comfort demand
shuddered at the thought of her suffering and her exposure, as though
he had seen his own little daughter naked and shivering in the snows
and the winds of a winter's night.
When he left her presence that day he could think of nothing but
her piteous story. The heroic courage of the young girl, the noble
qualities she had all unconsciously revealed in the course of its
narration, the utter friendlessness of her position, and the fearless
frankness of her confidence in himself, all touched his heart closely.
It seemed horrible to him that any woman-child should suffer so much
and be surrounded with such cruel perils. Those days in Paris had done
the work of years upon this innocent creature, who had before only
known the freshness of sea and shore, the safety of a sheltered youth,
the dauntless gaiety of a buoyant and unchecked spirit; but he saw that
all through it, through all its miseries and all its temptations, she
had kept her soul unhurt. He dared not ask her how she had done so, but
he knew that she had defended herself safely from all foul contact, and
again it seemed to him a miracle great as that which guides the swallow
over desert and ocean back to its last year's nest.