Читать книгу Othmar - Ouida - Страница 10

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In a little while she returned, bearing in her strong grasp an old silver tray, with coffee, cream, and sugar in old silver pots.

The servant followed her, cross, wrinkled and suspicious, carrying bread and honey and oranges, and a pile of sweet flat cakes. Damaris set down her tray on the marble table.

'We have a few things like this,' she said, touching the old silver. 'We were noble, too, once, very, very long ago, they say; but my grandfather does not believe it. I like to believe it. It may be nonsense, but one likes to fancy that ever, ever so long ago one's forefathers were fighting men, not labourers; it seems to make one ready to fight too. It must make a difference, I think, in oneself whether they were soldiers or slaves. Not, you know,' she added, after a moment's pause, 'that I do not think la petite culture the happiest life in the world; but the labourer is narrow, mean, horribly fond of money, and very rough to his women, and I suppose the poor were still worse in that distant time.'

She poured him out his coffee as she spoke, and filled up the cup with foaming milk, and pressed on him the rolls, the cakes, the honey. The china was the heavy earthenware which rustic people use, and did not suit the old silver of the tray and of the vessels; but Loswa, for once, was not critical; he thought he had never tasted anything more delicious than was this island fare.

Damaris, having served him, ate and drank herself, sitting on a wooden stool beside the balustrade covered with the reddened creeper. She did not want anything, but not to break bread with a guest seemed to her bad manners. She had pulled her sleeves down and put on shoes and stockings. She had thrown aside her woollen cap; her silky, golden curls shone in the sun; her eyes looked at him with honest inquisitiveness and astonishment. Suddenly she said aloud:

'Ah! I remember now! It was you who were with that lady yesterday when she threw me the gold bracelet over the wall.'

Loswa assented, but he would have preferred to forget his friend at that moment, being uneasily conscious of the contempt with which his present position on this terrace would be regarded by her did she ever know of it.

'Did she take me for a beggar?' said Damaris, with anger glistening under her long lashes.

'Oh no, she only wished to please you—to surprise you. You see, she could not tell who you were.'

The girl's cheeks grew a deeper rose.

'That is true,' she said, with her first touch of embarrassment; 'I was rowing, and one cannot row in fine clothes. Perhaps, if she saw me at Mass——'

'If she saw you now!' said he, with a glance of meaning thrown away upon her. 'Remember, she hardly saw you at all; only an old boat, a pile of oranges, a ragged sail——'

'My sail is very shabby,' said Damaris with shame. 'I took the new one to make this awning, and my grandfather was angry and would not let me have another. Who is that lady? She looked very pretty. Is she your wife?'

'She is the Countess Othmar.'

'The Countess Othmar!' she repeated in a little awe. Even she in her solitude had heard that name of power. The narrative was very vague to her; she had never known more than the bare outline of it, but she remembered, when she was a child sitting amongst the daffodils and plucking them on the grass before the house on Bonaventure one evening in the springtime, hearing Catherine, who had been with a load of fruit to the mainland, cry aloud to Raphael:

'Holy Virgin, what think you? The petiote of Nicole, the wife of Othmar, is dead!'

And the child, pausing with the daffodils lying in tumbled gold upon her lap, had listened and heard all that was known of that early death, which only the swallows had witnessed and the blind house-dog had mourned. She had always remembered it, and often, when she had seen the daffodils yellow in the grass of March, had thought of it again, and her imagination had been busy with it, creating bodily forms for the people of whom she knew naught but the names. Therefore, when the word 'Othmar' fell now upon her ear, it moved her with a certain thrill, almost as of personal pain.

'You have heard of her?' said Loswa.

'Not of her,' said Damaris gravely; 'of the one who died—who killed herself, they say, because he loved another woman.'

'Bah!' said Loswa, with the light contempt for all such tragic follies which the boulevardier always affects, even when he does not feel it.

'They said so,' repeated Damaris, with her eyes very large and serious.

'Do you like this lady very much?' she asked, after a pause.

'She is a charming person; yes.'

'Is she a very great lady? Does she reign over anything?'

'Over everyone she approaches, if she can,' said he with some impatience; 'and nearly always she can, for she is a person of very strong will, and influences others more than she knows or they know.'

'And what does she do when she has influenced them? Monsignor says that to possess influence is to have the ten talents, and that we shall have to account for the use of every one of them.'

'That is just the chief mischief,' said Loswa, gloomily thinking of himself, not of his auditor. 'It is the getting the influence that amuses her; that she cares about. When once she has got it you are nothing at all to her; no more than a glove she has worn.'

'She must be a very cruel woman,' said Damaris.

'Oh no,' he protested, with a sudden sense of his disloyalty, 'she is not cruel at all, she is only indifferent.'

'Indifferent? That is to neither like nor dislike? I do not understand how one can be like that. One must either have good weather or bad; one must either love or hate.'

'She does neither,' said he with a sigh; then, with a sense that it was altogether wrong to blame a great lady and a countrywoman of his own to a little country girl whom he had never seen before, he changed the subject abruptly.

'Are you not very dull on your island? It is a long way off the mainland.'

'Dull? Oh, people must be very stupid who are ever dull. There is always so much to do out among the fruit-trees or down by the beach. The days are always too short for me.'

'That is the charm of being fifteen. Are you always on this island? Do you never go to Nice?'

'I have never seen Nice. I did want to see the Carnival last year, but my grandfather would not hear of it. It was Raphael told me about it. It must have been very fine; but, of course, we have nothing to do with the mainland, that is only for the rich idle people. I hear they sleep all the day and buzz about all the night, like moths or like bats. What a strange life it must be!'

Loswa thought of the great gaslit glittering Salle des Jeux which was not more than a dozen leagues off this primitive orange-island.

'You are happier here, in the middle of your blue water, putting out your oil lamps as the moon rises,' he replied. 'Chateaubriand might have lived on Bonaventure. Who would have believed there was anything so solitary and so innocent as this within a few hours' sail of the Blanc paradise?'

'What is that?' said Damaris, who, although she could see afar off the palms and domes of Monte Carlo gleaming in the sun on the northward horizon every time she sailed that way, was as profoundly ignorant of the tripot and its works as if Bonaventure had been in the Pacific.

'I have heard,' she continued, 'that there are very strange things and people over there, that it is a feast-day every day with them, and all their life like a fair. My grandfather always says he would shoot them all down as they shot the hostages in the Commune, but I do not think that would be right. If they are silly, one should pity them.'

'They are silly indeed, and I fear your sweet pity would not avail to save them. The feast-day is a sorry affair at its close.'

'Oh, I know. I have seen Raphael come home drunk and beat Jacqueline (that is his wife) because she cried; and he is as good as gold when he is sober, and as gentle as a sheep when there is no drink.'

'In some way we all drink, we unfortunates,' said Loswa; then, seeing her look of surprise, he added, 'I did not speak literally, my dear; your Raphael's drink is a petit vin bleu, and ours is a costly thing we call Pleasure, but it comes to the same result; only, I suppose, Raphael has some five or six days in the week that he is good for work, and we cannot say as much as that. We are all the week round at the fair.'

She ruffled her pretty loose short locks that hung over her forehead, and her brilliant eyes looked at him perplexedly.

'I am glad I live on the island,' she said as the issue of her perplexity.

'And I too am glad you do,' said he, with more sincerity than he usually put into his pretty speeches.

He felt that before he approached the great object of his voyage he must justify his pretences and win her confidence by painting something which would please her fancy. To his facility of touch it was easy and rapid work to sketch on his block of paper the sea view, the terrace wall, the interior of the sitting-room, the old chairs, and the silver tankards. Sheet after sheet was filled and cut off and sent fluttering into her eager hands. To her it seemed the work of magic. Just a little water and a few pans of colour could make all the sea and sky, all the plants and stones, all the pots and pans and household things, seem real again on fragments of paper! She did not heed or even know that he was a man, young and handsome, whose eyes spoke a bold and amorous language; she was absorbed in his creations; he seemed to her the most marvellous of sorcerers. With delighted cries of recognition she welcomed the likeness of all the places and the objects so familiar to her; she was filled with a rapture of childish ecstasy. She hung over his work and watched him with a wonder which was only not awe, because it was such frank and childish delight.

Whilst he sketched, he let her talk at her will, in her own fashion, putting a few careless questions now and then. She was by nature gay and communicative; the seclusion and severity of her rearing had not extinguished the natural buoyancy and originality of her temper, and it was a pleasure to her to have anyone to speak to of other things than the land labours and the household work.

In a few brief phrases she had described to him all her short simple life; how her mother had died at her birth, they said, and her father when she had been eight years old; how she had never been baptised 'or anything,' until, to please Melville, her grandsire had allowed her to enter the Church's fold like a little stray sheep; how she had been brought up by old Catherine, and taught to read by her, and how she had managed to read all the books her mother had left: Corneille, Racine, Lamartine, Lamotte, Fouquet, La Fontaine, and knew them almost all by heart, for she had no new ones; she told him all about the culture of the olive and the various kinds of oranges, and all the different methods of pruning, tending, packing them; the big fragrant golden balls were much nearer to her heart than the black oily olives, but she was learned about both; she told him also all about the poor people she knew on the coast, of the young men whom the conscription had taken just as they were of use to their people, of the old women who took the flowers into the towns, of the children who could swim and dive like little fish, and were her playmates when she had time to play; the boat-builders, the fisherfolk, the flower-sellers, the toilers of the working world of whom all the fashionable world that flocks to the Riviera knows nothing, unless it throws them a few pence in the dust of the road, or thinks they form a pretty point of colour against the white walls and the flower-filled grass, or bids them make a bouillabaisse for a picnic in some little wooden cabin high up upon the red rocks, amongst the cactus spikes and the sea-pinks.

All this simple talk interested Loswa as it would never have done had not the mouth which uttered it been as lovely to look at as a half-opened damask rose.

'How came Monsignor Melville to speak of me to you?' she asked once with a persistency which was a strong trait of her character.

'He recognised you,' he answered her. 'He told us that you were prouder than any princess of them all, and that where we had meant but a joke you had, very naturally, seen an affront. He is much attached to you, I am sure, and felt quite as angry as you were.

'I was very angry,' she said passionately, with the colour hot in her cheeks. 'I thought the lady took me for a beggar. When one goes in a boat one cannot be endimanchée. I was taking the oranges to the Petite Afrique; there is a little old woman who keeps a little old shop there, and has nothing but what she makes by the sale of the fruit people give her. There are three trees here that are my own; my father planted them when he was home from a voyage, and to all their fruit I have a right. Grandfather lets me sell it or give it away.'

'And I am sure you do always the latter?'

'Oh, not quite always. Sometimes I want money for something, and then I sell the oranges; but it is only if there be a wreck, or a boat lost at sea, or a death or a birth. Of course I want nothing for myself; grandfather does not let me want, but he is not fond of giving to others, he likes to keep money locked up, and see it grow slowly bit upon bit like the coral. Do you like that? Myself, I think there is no pleasure at all in money except to give it away.'

'But whom do you give it to? You are all alone on your island.'

'There are the people who work for us; and then I know so many on the coast. I have come and gone between this and the mainland so many many times, ever since I was a baby. It is such a good life being on the sea; so long as I have the water I never want anything else. Some of them call me la mouette.'

'It is the best of all lives. I am much on the sea myself,' said her companion, who hated the sea.

'You have a boat then?'

'I have a yacht; yes.'

'All to yourself?'

'Yes; to go about in as I fancy. I shall be delighted if you will sail in it some day.'

'Ah! it is a pleasure-ship then? I see those little ships racing often; they are beautiful. You must be very rich to have one all to yourself, not trading anywhere, or even dredging. How much money have you? And how do you keep it? In boxes, in coffers? Some of my grandfather's is down the well; he took bricks out of the side of the well, put the money in the hole, and then put back the bricks again. He did it at night; no one knows it but me. Do you keep your money like that?'

'No; in our world we give it to other men to take care of for us.'

'That seems very stupid. Why not take care of your own?'

She was sitting on the parapet of the terrace, her feet hung down; she leaned one hand on the stone she sat on; behind her was the broad blue of the sky, and about her all the shining of the effulgent light. She looked like a rhododendron flower growing up into the sunshine out of a corner of a dusky old garden.

'You have not told me how much money you have,' she pursued. 'If you let other folks take care of it for you, it is no wonder that you gentle people come to poverty so often.'

'We have too many caretakers, no doubt,' said Loswa, 'and they feather their own nests. But I am not a very rich man; pray do not think I am. I am only an artist. Nobody is rich now except the Jews here, and the rogues across the Atlantic. Would you let me make a sketch of yourself just as you sit now? It would be charming.'

'Will you give it to that lady?'

'No, on my honour. I will give it to you, and make a copy for myself.'

'Well, if you like; but would it not be better if I put on my Sunday frock?'

'Not for worlds. Sunday frocks have no affinity with art, my dear; yours is, no doubt, a very pretty one, but I should prefer to make your portrait as I have seen you first.'

'Oh, I do not mind; only this gown is very shabby and old. I am grown too big for it. I am always growing. Monsignor says that if I grew in grace as I do in centimètres I should soon be a saint like our St. Veronica.'

'It is not for me to disparage the saints,' said Loswa, 'but I think you will have another mission in this life than to be of their community. Keep still a little while; I will not detain you long. So!—that is just right. I wish I were Raffaelle and Leonardo in one, to be worthier of the occasion.'

'Who are they?' said Damaris, as he set his folding easel straight before him and began to sketch in the flowerlike figure on the wall, fresh and wholesome as the sea-lavender that grew in the sand below. He who was all his life in a hothouse recognised the value and fragrance of that sea-born plant, though it was too homely and simple for him; recognised it with his mind, though not with his soul.

The girl knew nothing of all that made up the world to him; the names most common to him in modern literature and art were to her dead letters that said nothing; the allusions familiar to him would have been to her phrases without meaning; all that constitutes modern culture was to her as an unknown country, and the only whisper she had ever heard of all that poets and artists tell the world was what she had felt rather than understood of the read and re-read pages of 'Athalie,' and of 'Attila,' of 'Cinna,' and of 'Sintram.' Yet there was a certain richness, as of virgin soil, in that absolute freedom from conventional education, and from received ideas; she expressed herself with simplicity and vigour, and this unworn, untrained mind, only nurtured on the high thoughts of great poets, had escaped all the bondage of tradition and of secondhand knowledge, and remained what it had been made by nature.

It required a higher intelligence than Loswa's was wholly to appreciate this charm; he was too conventional to be greatly attracted by unconventional things; he was too used to all the artificial attractions of artificial women, and too artificial himself to enjoy and admire all this freshness of fancy. It would have needed a poet to have done so, and he had nothing of the poet in him. But he was enough of a student of human nature to understand that with which he scarcely sympathised, and she was so handsome that her physical beauty created in him a compassion for the solitude in which it dwelt, such compassion as her intellectual solitude, and her half-unconscious longing for wider worlds than her own, would have failed to awaken.

'Is it possible that all that is to go to a gros bourgeois who builds boats?' he thought, as he looked at the beautiful lines of her features and her form, and that fairness of her skin just warmed by sun and air into the bloom as of a peach, which he strove in vain to reproduce to his own satisfaction in his drawing. A face that would turn all Paris after it like sunflowers after the sun, to be left to pass from the glow of youth to the greyness of age on a little island in mid-sea! It seemed impossible—it would become impossible if she once learned her own charms.

'Your isle is worthy of Paul and Virginia,' he said to her, speaking to her in the phrase that she could understand, for she knew every line of Bernardin de St. Pierre. 'But where is Paul? Is there no Paul?'

'No, there is nobody at all like Paul,' she answered, with a little laugh at the idea. 'The youngest man is Raphael, and he has a fat wife and five children. They live down on the other side of the cliffs.'

'But Paul will come,' said Loswa. 'He always comes. Would you let me substitute myself for him?' he added with that somewhat impertinent audacity which had made his success so great amongst women of the world.

It did not please Damaris. Her brows drew together in that instantaneous and tempestuous anger which her face had expressed as the bracelet had fallen on her lap.

'You are not at all like Paul,' she said a little contemptuously. 'You are not young enough, and you have wrinkles about your eyes.'

Loswa reddened with irritation. He was still young, but life in the world ages fast, and he was conscious that to this child, in the first flush and sunrise of her earliest girlhood, he might well seem old.

'You are cruel,' he said humbly, 'and I am unhappy; I can only envy the Paul of the future.'

'Oh,' said Damaris very tranquilly, 'I know all about my future. I am to marry my cousin, Louis Roze; he has a chantier at St. Tropez; he is quite rich; he is very ugly and stout; he builds boats and barques; myself, I would sooner sail in them.'

She said all the sentences in the same even voice; marriage seemed to her to be hardly of as much interest as the boats.

'Good heavens!' said Loswa involuntarily. 'Athene to a Satyr!'

He could imagine the shipwright of St. Tropez without much effort of imagination; a black-browed son of the soil, smoking a short pipe, supping up prawn-soup noisily on feast days; a Socialist, no doubt, and an argumentative politician when he had drunk his glass of brandy, or he would not be to the taste of the Sieur Bérarde, her grandfather. This her future! As well might a young nightingale, singing under acacia flowers in spring, talk of its future when it should be roasting on the spit to give a mouthful to a boor!

'Do you not intend to refuse?' he said abruptly, without thinking whither such suggestion might lead her.

She turned quickly and looked at him with astonished eyes; her breath came and went more quickly.

'Refuse!' she repeated. 'Refuse! oh no; what would be the use? No one refuses to do what my grandfather has decided for them.'

'But you cannot be willing to make such a marriage?'

She was astonished and troubled by the rebellious suggestion.

'I do not think about it,' she replied at last, shaking the hair out of her eyes. 'It is a thing which is to be, you know. What is the use of thinking I am not to leave Bonaventure. I should not like to marry anyone who would not live on Bonaventure; but if I stay here and live as I always have done, it will not make any difference at all.'

He was silent. This absolute ignorance of what she talked about seemed to him pathetic and sacred. He did not wish to be the one to break away the wall which stood between her and the realities of life.

'He thinks of making a chantier here,' she explained; 'the only doubt is whether anyone will ever come such a distance to order a boat or a brig; and whether it would really pay to bring the timber out so far as this——'

'Good heavens!' said Loswa again.

'Why are you so surprised?' she said, looking at him in perplexity.

'How can you think about timber and shipwrights?' he said, irrationally enough he knew. 'What a life for you! I thought you loved Racine and Corneille.'

'But there is no one else here who loves them,' she answered with a little sigh. 'It is only making money that they care about—money—always money—and when it is made nobody enjoys it.'

'But who can oblige you to marry this man of St. Tropez?'

She ruffled her hair, not very well knowing what to reply.

'It is decided so,' she answered at last.

'But many things are decided for us which we do not accept. No one has any right to dispose of our own future against our own will.'

She looked vaguely troubled: the sense of herself as of an independent entity had never before presented itself to her.

'All those things are settled for one,' she said with some impatience. 'It is not worth talking about. Whether it is Gros Louis or another, it is the same to me. They are all stupid, they all smoke, they all drink when they can, they all say there is no God, and that there must never be any kings. They are all just alike.'

She was not conscious of the sombre revolt and vague contempt which were at work in her as the heat of the distant thunder cloud dulls slightly the sunny blue of a June sky.

'But there is another world than theirs,' said Loswa.

'Out of the books?'

'Yes, beside the dreamland of the books. All the earth is not peopled with shipwrights and skippers. There is a world——'

He hesitated, for he was afraid of alarming her; it seemed to him that, were she displeased, she would send him spinning down the cliff with short ceremony.

'There is a world where life is always en fête, where women are treated not as goods and chattels and beasts of burden, but as sovereigns and sorceresses; where you yourself——'

'I shall never go there,' she said, abruptly interrupting him. 'Do not talk about it. It makes me restless. I feel as I do when I look over there.'

She pointed northward, where the unseen shore was.

'I see the sun shine on the mountains, and I see a dazzle of gold, a gleam of white, a long low line under the blue of the hills, and I know that is what they call the world, the big world; but I never land there; it is not for me.'

'Let me take you,' he said softly.

'No,' she said with petulance and resolution. 'Grandfather does not allow me ever to see the mainland without him; he says it is accursed, that the people are all mad. And now, as you have eaten and drunk all you will, it will be best that you should go: he may return any time, and he does not love strangers.'

'But I may come back and bring you your portrait?'

Her eyes smiled, but she said carelessly, 'That can be as you like. You are very welcome to what you have had. I will show you the way to the shore, though I dare say you would find it again by yourself.'

He endeavoured to linger, but she gave him no leisure to do so. She escorted him to the edge of the steep descent, and there bade him a decided adieu.

Loswa, with all his grace and ease and habits of the world, felt at a loss before this child. He would have kissed her hand in farewell, but her arms were folded on her chest as she stood on the rock above him, and nodded to him a good-humoured good-bye; cheerfully, indifferently, as any boy of her years might have done.

'It is easy to see that you come from Paris!' she called after him, watching his descent along the passerelle with a kindly little laugh at the hesitation of his steps.

'Let her marry Gros Louis!' he thought angrily as that clear childish laughter echoed through the sunlit air from above his head. 'I have her portrait—that is all that matters.'

What a feature of the next year's Salon would be that brilliant, bold head when it should be hung in the full light of a May day, for all Paris to gaze upon, marked 'D'après Nature,' and signed Loswa!

He soon, despite his indolent limbs, which were more used to the boulevards than the sand and the shingle, regained his boat, and pushed it in deep water.

Damaris Bérarde stood above on the brow of the cliff, amongst the olive-boughs and the great leaves of the fig-trees, looking towards that pale golden far-off shore where 'the world' was a world with other men than Raphael and Gros Louis, with other fruits than the round orange and the black olive, with other music than the tinkle of the throat-bells of the goats.