Othmar was naturally of a tender and even enthusiastic nature. His
sympathies were warm and spontaneous, his imagination was strong and
governed his reason very often. There was much in the circumstances
of this poor child which appealed both to tenderness and imagination,
and he was haunted by her swift mellow voice, with its meridional
intonations, her great dark luminous eyes filling with sudden tears as
she remembered her island home.
He felt that they owed her a debt. They had robbed her of her
birthright of simple joys and honest, obscure, healthful ways of life.
They could never again make her what they had found her. Who can put
back the gathered rosebud on the rose-bough?
They had a right to give her what they could give in lieu of all which
she had lost, indirectly but indisputably, through their means. His
conscience, as well as his common sense, told him that as his wife had
been the chief offender against the child's peace, so she had the first
right to know the results of her interference, and amend them. But he
had the moral timidity of proud, reticent, and sensitive natures: he
dreaded her irony and her indifference. He could not tell what she
would say or do; possibly in the end something which he would approve;
but he knew that first of all she would ridicule him: with her lips
certainly, very likely even in her thoughts. Even when he had been her
lover she had always laughed at him for taking life so seriously, for
being Ruy Blas and Rolla rather than Sir Harry Wildair. And even if
she were moved to any kindness, how likely would her languid, haughty
footsteps tread hurtfully, without knowing or heeding it, on the
storm-tossed wild flower? She could be exquisitely kind, magnificently
generous; none more so: but was it not, alas! only while her mood to be
so lasted?
'I will tell her--later,' he said, with that temporising before
difficulty which many a man, bold and even rash in his dealings with
his fellow-men, is apt to adopt when he deals with women.
Meanwhile, something had to be done at once, he knew, to reconcile
Damaris to her dependence upon himself. He knew she was of the temper
which would break loose from the safest shelter and rush to the direst
danger if she deemed herself humiliated by assistance. In all her grace
of youth and helplessness of circumstance, there was still something
warm, strong, untameable in her, which he felt as the hand which holds
a bird will feel its wings stir and tremble ready to fly. It would, he
knew, be hard to aid her. It would have to be done in her own despite.
A thought occurred to him; one of those spontaneous ideas which come
to us like very angels, and which, in after years, seem rather born of
hell than heaven. On it he spoke to her the next day.
'Tell me, my dear--your grandfather died after you had left the island
some months? Well, did you never hear any details of his death or of
his will? You know only what the pedlar said?'
'Only that.'
'Then I think you should know more. He may have repented him of his
cruelty, or he may have made some sort of bequest to you, even if the
bulk of what he had has gone to your cousin. My people there could
soon inquire. Will you allow me to do that?'
'If you wish. But I am certain he left me nothing--never thought of me.
You did not know him: once he had put any person out of his heart, it
was to him as if they never had lived at all. He was very hard, and he
never by any chance forgave. Beside--he told me--I had no claim on him,
was nothing to him.'
'Legally. But sixteen years of life spent beside him could scarcely
pass utterly out of his memory. If he had left you anything, it is
possible your cousin was not honest enough to say so. I will inquire
at any rate. It will be more satisfaction to you to know more definite
tidings than the hawker could possibly give you.'
'I am sure he left me nothing. But I should be glad to hear of Raphael
and the dogs.'
'You shall hear. Raphael, I have no doubt, will be as glad to hear of
you. Meanwhile be sure that both my wife and I should be unhappy if
you fled away from our roof out into the world again. The world is not
a kind place or a safe place, my dear, for those who are young and
motherless.'
'But I must do something,' she repeated feverishly. 'I must do
something. I cannot live on your charity. I would die sooner!'
'I tell you I do not like the word of "charity,"' said Othmar. 'When
people have all a common misfortune, they have as it were a common tie.
We have all the misfortune, the supreme misfortune, of human life.'
Even absorbed as she was in her own great straits and needs, Damaris
was astonished at such words from one who, it seemed to her, was at the
very summit of all earthly happiness.
'If he be not content, who can be?' she thought.
'It is a tie,' continued he, unconscious of her surprise, 'which binds
us all together. No one is so fortunate that he may not live to want
aid and pity. It is not so very many years ago, as the lives of nations
count, that here in Paris a king and queen became so friendless that
none dare say a kind adieu to them as they went to their deaths upon
the scaffold. Compared to Marie Antoinette, how rich you are! You have
youth, talents, friends, and all your future.'
'I have no friends,' said Damaris, with a gloomy rejection of all
solace.
'You have one at least,' said Othmar. 'You are a little in love with
sorrow, my dear; all imaginative youth is so. When we have really had
its actuality with us for awhile, we get to hate it bitterly, and do
all we can to forget its presence.'
She looked at him with wonder.
'Have you ever been unhappy?' she said incredulously; 'with all these
beautiful places? with that beautiful lady? with all the world?'
'One is never happy for more than a day,' said Othmar with some
impatience. 'One wants, one wishes, one desires, one obtains, one
regrets--there is the whole gamut of all human notes. The scale no
sooner ascends than it descends. There is nothing happy except youth,
which does not know that it is so, and so goes through all the glories
of its time ignorant, purblind, longing to cease to be youth.'
'I was quite happy on the island,' said Damaris wistfully.
'Then you were wiser than I ever was,' said Othmar, as he thought with
a sort of remorse of how this innocent animal happiness, born of the
waves, and the winds, and the sun, and the blossoms, and the radiant
joy of mere living, had been destroyed by one breath and glimpse of
the world, as a flower withers up in a flame, as a bird drops dead in
carbonised air. Had they only let her alone, she would have been happy
still.
'Yes,' Damaris sighed, and her eyes had a weary, troubled,
introspective look. They saw the blue sea washing the face of the
cliffs, the white dogs barking on the strip of yellow sand, the steep
path going up and up and up under the olive trees, the old woman in her
blue kirtle and a grey hood coming from out the groves of orange and of
lemon, a saucepan freshly scoured or linen freshly washed in her horny
hands--had all those familiar pictures faded for ever from her sight?
Béthune had said truly that to gather the rosebud is the act of an
instant, but what power in heaven or on earth shall put the rosebud,
once broken off, back again upon the mother plant? If by any force of
will or of wealth they were to buy back her island again for her, it
would never be possible to give her back with the solid soil, and the
old house-roof, and the fruitful trees of it, the old, sweet, happy
ignorance and peace of her childhood there.
'She is not here?' she asked suddenly, as she roused herself from her
dream of her old home.
'My wife?' he asked in some surprise. 'No; she is in Russia.'
'She will despise me,' said Damaris, a dull red glow of shame mounting
over her forehead. 'Will you tell her that I was found in the streets?'
'Not if it pain you. But you mistake if you think----'
'I should hate her to know it,' said the girl under her breath. 'I
wanted to become something very great; something that she would hear
of and come to see; and then I should have said to her: "Yes, it is I,
madame, and you will not laugh at me any more now."'
'She never laughed at you. She admired you, and predicted a great
future for you,' said Othmar with a little embarrassment, not knowing
very well how to speak of one so near to him to this child, whose
memory was so tenacious alike of benefits and affronts.
'Is this house hers?' asked Damaris.
'Surely, my dear: what is mine is hers.'
Her face darkened.
'I am well now,' she said abruptly. 'May I not go away? I could get
work, I think, in the gardens or on the river; there would be things I
could do. I learnt something, too, at the convent in the mountains; not
much, but something. Pray try and get me work.'
'Do not be in such haste,' said Othmar. 'It sounds like a reproach to
me. You are most fully welcome, my child. I shall always feel that we
can never atone to you for being the cause, however unconsciously, of
the breaking up of your happy life. Wait, at least, until I have made
some inquiries into your grandfather's death and testament. It may very
well be that your cousin took the occasion of your absence to help
himself to more than was his due.'
'I do not think so. Louis was an honest man.'
'If he be honest, inquiry will not hurt him.'
He had resolved to go himself upon an errand which he had resolved not
to entrust to any of his agents, trustworthy though many of them were.
In the warm August night he took the express train for the south,
and went across the country, golden with ripe corn and green with
vine-leaves, straightway to the sultry shores of the south, deserted by
their hosts of guests, and sweltering, baked and white with dust, in
the intense suns of the late summer weather.
He went first to the seaport of St. Tropez, and made inquiries in its
dockyard and shipyard as to Louis Roze. He found that the man had
really inherited the possessions of his uncle Bérarde, had married
a young woman of the town, and was now living on the island of
Bonaventure. So far the tale told by the pedlar to Damaris had been
true. An old man, an owner of a coasting brig, who had done business
with the Bérardes all his life, told him also of the manner of Jean
Bérarde's death, and added, with regret, that the curmudgeon had left
not a penny to his granddaughter because she had refused to marry her
cousin; and added, further, that the poor child had gone no one knew
whither. It was a pity, the old man said regretfully, for she had had
a face and a voice that it did good to the souls of men to see and to
hear, and had been as active on the sea as any curlew, and so handy
with a boat, even in wild weather, that it had been a pleasure to sail
with her anywhere.
Asked as to whether she had truly no legal claim upon her grandsire,
the old skipper affirmed that everybody had always known she was a
bastard, except herself; but nobody had ever supposed it would make
any difference in her succession to Bonaventure. Louis Roze had always
known it, but had been willing to marry her to prevent any division
of the property. So much he learned, sitting on the sea-wall of St.
Tropez, and letting the old master of the brig _Paul Mousse_ ramble on
at will with the sunbaked land behind them, and before them a sea, tame
as a plain, and oil-like in the drowsy drought.
He knew who Othmar was, as did most people on those shores, and readily
told him all he knew, though silently wondering why he was asked these
questions.
Othmar slept that night at his own house, and on the morrow, almost
before the sun was up, took one of his own sailing-boats, and, attended
only by one man, crossed the well-nigh motionless sea in the direction
of Bonaventure. When the isle rose in sight, lifting its green cone out
of the waves in the hot blue air, it was still early in the morning. As
he went over the smooth surface of the summer sea, skimmed by thousands
of gulls and fanned by languid fruit-scented breezes from the land, his
heart ached for the sea-born child shut away under the zinc roofs and
gilded vanes of Paris. Even if he could buy back her island, who could
make her quite what she had been? He was angered against his wife, who,
for sake of an absurd caprice, which had had no more duration in it
than the light of a wax match, had brought about so sad an exile, so
utter an uprooting and alteration of a simple and a happy life.
He, like many men of high position, deemed a lowly fate by far the
happiest; he would have agreed with Cowley and George Herbert, and
would have chidden Herrick for not being content amidst his Devon moors
and streams, his cherry trees and roses.
Health, peace, and fresh air seemed to him three treasures which were
ill exchanged for the feverish struggle and the artificial joys of life
in the cities of the world.
When they neared the island they saw no one. The boat was easily run up
on to the smooth strip of beach, and he ascended the _passerelle_ and
the steps cut in the rock, as Loris Loswa had done before him once and
Damaris a thousand times.
Things were all changed upon the little isle. Catherine, dead, had
left no successor so thrifty and sturdy as herself; the man Raphael
had gone with all his family to live at Vallauris; Louis Roze and his
wife had new faces, new ways, new things about them. The dogs were
chained up; the old coble was newly painted; the little balcony had a
dab of gilding, tricolour paint, and some smoking chairs; the great
white rose had been cut down, the new owners had thought it harboured
caterpillars and slugs. Nature had made the place lovely, and even
man, the universal deformer and destroyer, could not make it wholly
otherwise. But it had lost its look of freshness and luxuriance, and
all its deep charm of solitude; it was choked up with vulgar furniture
and gewgaws that the bride thought fine and rare. Modern china stood
upon the shelves, and in the old solid silver pots artificial flowers
were stuck. Some maidens, with many colours in their gowns and great
ear-rings in their ears, cackled and giggled behind the orange trees.
It had been an idyl of George Sand's; it was now a rustic scene for an
operetta of Offenbach's.
All that could not be vulgarised was the pure air, rich with the odour
of millions of orange-blossoms, and the serene far-stretching sea, blue
as the mouse-ear growing by a woodland brook.
Louis Roze in his shirt-sleeves, smoking beside the door, was a
big, burly, red-faced man, with ear-rings also in his ears, and the
broad roll of the southern accent in his thick voice; his wife was a
buxom, brown, stout, and vulgar woman of four- or five-and-twenty.
They did not know Othmar by sight, and he did not make himself known
to them. He gave them an order for a boat in the name of one of his
own yacht-builders; an order large enough to open the heart of the
boat-builder of St. Tropez. Then by casual questions, and by letting
the owner of Bonaventure talk on and boast of his possessions, he
learned what he wanted to know: the facts of the elder Bérarde's death,
and of the amount which had been bequeathed to his nephew.
'He left everything he had on earth to me; he knew in whose hands it
would prosper and increase,' said in conclusion the big, oily-tongued,
boastful Provençal.
'Had he no other heirs at all?' asked Othmar, 'or was it your uncle's
very natural preference for yourself?'
'None on earth,' said the man hastily, with a little added red on his
red cheeks, and a quick glance of his eye.
'Who was the girl, then,' asked his guest, 'who used to live with him,
and go out in his brig?'
'She was nothing at all to Bérarde,' said Louis Roze sullenly,
beginning to perceive that he had been interrogated with a purpose.
'A bastard!' he added. 'The law does not recognise bastards.'
'The law, like proverbs, is the distilled wisdom of mankind,' said
Othmar. 'Like proverbs also, it occasionally may be caught tripping in
its wisdom.'
The man eyed him uneasily.
'She was a bastard,' he said again. 'I did generously by her, because
after all blood is blood. I sent her a handsome dowry; big enough to
get her a good spouse amongst better men than she had any right to look
for:--'
He felt angry and baffled, and would have been quarrelsome and have
told his visitant to mind his own business, only that he saw the
unbidden guest was a gentleman, and the order for the craft had made
him patient and obsequious.
Othmar looked at him with some disgust, changed his tone, and addressed
him with more severity.
'M. Louis Roze, it is no concern of mine you will say, but I am here
to tell you one thing, and you must listen to me. Legally, maybe, your
cousin Damaris had no claim on this estate, but you know that she was
brought up from infancy as her grandfather's heiress, that she was
always encouraged to believe the island would be her own, and that
only because of her refusal to marry you was she omitted from her
grandfather's will, to your benefit--perhaps from an old man's perverse
tyranny and rage, perhaps a little also from your suggestion and your
intrigues. Be that as it will, you are morally bound, unless you are
a cur indeed, to share your inheritance with one who has every moral
right, and right of usage, to the whole of it. The dower you boast of
having sent was returned to you. Your cousin is poor, but not so poor
as to take as your alms what is her right. She is with those who can
protect her, and is out of the danger to which you allowed her to drift
without stretching out a hand to save her. If you consent to divide
in equity your inheritance with her, I will tell you who I am, and
give you all proofs and explanations that you may reasonably require.
If you refuse I shall bid you good-morning, and rest content with the
satisfaction, not a rare one in this world, of having seen an unjust
and dishonest man.'
Louis Roze stared at him, perplexed by his tone, purple with rage and
astonishment, made a coward not by conscience but by fear of losing
a lucrative order, and so bewildered at the sudden attack that,
southerner though he was, he had no good lie ready. All he felt for the
moment sensible of was that not a bronze bit of the money, not a rood
of the soil, not a rotten bough off one of the trees, should go away
from himself to that girl, who had so grossly outraged him in refusing
his hand. In a boorish, dumb-animal fashion he had been in love with
the handsome child, who had always laughed at him and flouted him, and
had never even let him kiss her cheeks in cousinly manner. As she had
made her bed so she might lie in it. Not a sou should she get out of
him, that he swore; the will was a good will, attested and duly proved;
no one could gainsay it, and the young woman falsely called Bérarde was
without any possible claim whatever; there had been no legal adoption
of her. So he declared, with many an oath to keep his courage up before
this stranger, whose manner daunted him; and his wife overhearing that
it was a question of the inheritance which was under discussion, thrust
herself into the balcony and vociferated with shrill iteration and the
fury of a woman menaced in her dearest possessions, that whilst she
lived not a centime should ever go away from her lawful lord.
Othmar turned away before their clamour was half done.
'That is enough,' he said to them, 'keep all you have and may it
prosper with you. Your cousin has no need of it, but I thought it right
to give you a chance to do your duty.'
Louis Roze eyed him with perplexity, and grew silent.
Othmar asked him nothing more and took his leave; the bride and
her sisters watching his departure through the intricacy of the
orange-boughs, giggling and criticising him in audible phrase, their
black eyes and their gold hair-pins flashing in the sunshine amongst
the glossy leaves.
'That brute will do nothing for her,' he thought, as he descended to
his boat. 'And even if he were inclined ever to do so, his wife would
never let him follow his inclination. There is nothing on earth so
avaricious as peasants who have grown rich.'
He took his way back to the mainland, and left behind him much
uneasiness, wonder, and speculation amongst the inhabitants of
Bonaventure.
The will was a good will, and his position was as sound as sound law
could make it, yet Louis Roze was not quiet in his mind. He was not a
bad man, though greedy, and he felt that this stranger was right; that
something of all he had gained by this inheritance ought to go to the
child who for so many years had been allowed to look upon herself as
the future owner of Bonaventure. He was pursued by his recollections
of her leaping like a young kid up the rocks, steering through the sea
foam and the sunshine, gathering the oranges or the olives, carrying
the linen down to the beach to dry, running gaily with the white dogs
before her, swimming like a fish with her beautiful arms flung out on
the water, and her eyes smiling up at the sky; _la mouette_ as the
people had called her, because she was so at home in the waves and the
winds.
Truly she ought to have had something; she was of the old man's blood,
whether or no the law recognised her or not; and where was she and what
would become of her? His thoughts were painful and perplexed as he
smoked his pipe under the orange trees.
But he was not ready to part with any portion of what had been
bequeathed to him. He was well off certainly, still no one has ever
enough; and his wife was with child, and might in time give him a score
of children. It was better to keep what he had got, and, after all,
Damaris had insulted him after being affianced to him from the time she
was twelve, and his heart hardened utterly against her at that memory.
If she had not been an obstinate, insolent, wayward fool she would have
been here now, instead of the young woman from St. Tropez, who had a
shrew's tongue, which Louis Roze heard oftener than he cared to hear it.
So he thrust the matter from his mind and counted the oranges on the
tree nearest him with complacent sense of ownership. This stranger
had said that Damaris was with friends, let them look after her; his
conscience was clear.
When in the course of the day he learned from some deep-sea fishers
trawling near the island who his visitor had been--for the fishermen
had recognised Othmar as he had passed in his boat--Louis Roze felt
yet less sure that he had done wisely. To have pleased such a rich man
might have been worth more than an acre of land, than a handful of
gold. He hated aristocrats with all the savage hatred of a socialist
of the south, but he respected rich men with all the admiring esteem
which those who love money feel for those who possess it in unusual
abundance. The good-will of this _archimillionnaire_ might have been
more valuable to him than a little piece of the land, had he offered it
frankly as his cousin's share.
When, in a week's time, some persons came to him to seek to buy the
island, he was certain that they came from his late visitor, although
they came only in the name and by the commission of a well-known lawyer
of Aix.
He was himself dazzled by the great sums they were willing to propose,
was half-disposed to treat with them; but his bride was shrewder, or
thought herself so, than he.
'Would you barter your coming child's property?' she hissed in his ear.
'If rich men seek after the place, be sure it is because it has some
value we are not aware of; it has some buried treasure that they know
of, or some silver in the rocks, or some other ore or another. If you
sell it you will never forgive yourself. Keep it, and send them about
their business, and begin to bore in the ground and see what you can
find.'
The suggestion heated the fancy and the cupidity of her husband. Of
course, he reflected, no one offered three or four times the apparent
value of a place unless they knew that it would become worth what they
were anxious to pay for it; and he sternly refused to hearken to any
terms of sale for the rock of Bonaventure.
'What is mine is mine, and all the kings of the earth cannot buy it of
me,' he said, with a petty mind's delight in power and in the occasion
of baffling and thwarting his superiors.
'I believe he is in love with the girl,' he added to his wife, 'and
wants to get the island for her. We might make a rare bargain if it
were so; but those men of Aix are too cautious to let out who is behind
them.'
'Roze,' the wife said, 'you are a simpleton. There is no love in the
business. They know of some value in the island that we do not; that
is why they want to buy. Because you are for ever hankering yourself
after that great-eyed, long-limbed child, you think every other man is
just a fool the same.'
And Louis Roze, whose temper was cowed by the fiercer sharper temper of
his bride, gave in to her argument, and remained so stubborn that the
agents from Aix could come to no terms with him.
Inspired by the idea of buried treasures or possible ore in the rocks,
he began to neglect his own affairs at St. Tropez and elsewhere, and
dig and delve himself in the soil, and hack at the stone face of the
cliffs with a pickaxe. The chimera of a fantastic hope entered into him
and gave him no peace; he was ready to ruin all the fair fruits of the
surface, and all the artificial soil brought there at such labour in
the previous century, for the sake of this imaginary wealth, hidden in
the bowels of the isle.
Meantime the men of Aix informed Othmar that it was not possible to
induce the proprietor to part with Bonaventure, and ventured to hint
that the property was not worth one-half or one-quarter of what he had
been willing to spend on its purchase.
'That may be,' he said; 'but it is a caprice of mine. If the island
ever comes into the market, obtain it for me on any terms. The owner
may need money some day, or may change his mind.'
His experience of men was that they always sold things in the long run,
if they could do so with advantage, and that they seldom remained in
the same mind when it turned to their profit to change it.