Othmar. Ouida
But he would not have cared for them had there been no human interest beside them.
After sailing steadily some two hours or so they sighted, and in another two hours neared, a little island which was certainly the one marked on the French chart as Bonaventure, lying all alone far out to the south-west. Loswa did not need the positive assertion of his crew to tell him that he had arrived at his desired goal. It was small, conical-shaped, high, and steep, with a broad reef of sand to the northward. It rose aloft in the air, grey with olives, green with orange-trees. No habitation was visible upon it; but on the sand there was drawn up high and dry an old boat with a sail of Venetian red stained brown by wear and tear.
The island had evidently been made fruitful at the cost of many centuries of labour; the natural rock of it was terraced with many ridges rising one above another, each planted with productive trees; the soil had no doubt been carried up load by load with infinite trouble; but the effect of the whole was luxuriant and picturesque, as the conelike mass of verdure, here silver-grey and there emerald green, towered upward in the thin sun-pierced vapours of the early day.
The soundings showed deep water almost up to the rock itself.
'I am going to sketch,' said Loswa to his skipper as he pointed to the level strip of sand. 'Let me land there.'
Their assertions that no one ever did land there he disregarded. A small boat was rowed up to the strip of beach, and he got out, bidding his sailors wait round the edge of a jutting rock, which would give them shade as the day should advance.
He glanced at the old red coble drawn up on the shore. It was the same he had seen three days before; he felt sure of it by its colour and its build.
He looked about him and around him for a means of ascent, and saw a zigzag path that wound up through the hanging orchards of olive, of lemon, and of orange, and higher still the rope-ladder called passerelle, so often used in the Riviera to climb steep rocks. The air was full of the intense perfume of the trees, which were starred all over with their white blossoms. He thought of Sicily, where you have to shut your door against the fragrance of the fields in spring, lest you should faint and sleep for ever from their fragrance.
The path and the passerelle would certainly, he reasoned, lead up to any house there might be at the summit. He slung his sketching things over his shoulder and began to mount the crooked rocky road of moss-grown stone with cyclamen growing in its crevices, and the rose-hued flowers of the leafless cereus springing up here and there.
But he was not allowed to ascend unchallenged; high above him there was a rustling sound, then a deep angry growl, and in a moment or two a great white Pyrenean dog showed himself, stared down at him with frank hostility, and bounded headlong from ridge to ridge underneath the boughs, with full intent to reach him and devour him. But a voice called aloud: 'Tò, tò, Clovis!' and Loswa smiled. He knew he had succeeded.
Through the labyrinth of branches, springing after the dog, came the girl who had thrown back the gold bracelet to the lady of St. Pharamond.
'The dog will not hurt you whilst I am here,' she called out to him. 'But he might kill you if I were not. Do you want my grandfather? Why have you landed here? It is private ground. He has gone to Grasse for two days to see an oil merchant.'
Loswa felt that he could not have timed his visit more felicitously.
'Good heavens! what a handsome child,' he thought, as he bowed to her with his easy grace and that eloquent glance which had power to stir the most languid pulses of his patrician sitters.
'I landed in hopes that I might be allowed to paint the view from this exquisite little spot,' he said with well-acted hesitation in his manner. 'A friend of mine, who is, I think, a friend of yours too, a priest of the name of Melville, has spoken to me so often of the beauty of your island.'
Standing above him, holding the big dog by the collar, she smiled at the name of Melville, and came a few steps nearer with more confidence. She never for a moment doubted the entire truth of what he said.
Her blue-and-brown-striped linen gown was but a wisp; it had been drenched through in its time with sea-water, and had the stains of grasses, and dews, and sands, and fruits upon it; it was bound round her waist by a leathern belt, and its short sleeves were pulled up to the shoulder, as they had been the day before. But no artist would have wished for a better dress, and even a sculptor would not have desired to remove it from the limbs that it clung to so closely that it hid nothing of their perfect shape and the curves of the throat and breast that had the indecision and softness of childhood with the fulness of feminine growth. Her hair was tucked away under a red fisher cap, a veritable bonnet rouge; and her large brilliant eyes, of an indescribable colour, were shining, as if the sun was imprisoned in them, under level, dark delicate eyebrows. Her skin was fair, her hair auburn. He thought he had seen nothing so perfectly lovely in all his life: it was a living Titian, a virgin Giorgione.
'Anyone who knows Monsignor Melville is welcome to Bonaventure,' she said frankly. 'It is a pity my grandfather is away. He does not like strangers, but a friend of Monsignor's would not seem so to him. No one has ever been here to paint anything before. What is it you want to paint—the house?'
Loswa knew that he had done a dishonourable thing, and a mean one, in using Melville's name as a passport to a place where Melville would never have allowed him to go had he known it; but, like everyone else, having begun on a wrong course he went on in it. He had succeeded so well at the commencement that he would not listen to that delicacy of good breeding which represented conscience to him.
'Do not be afraid of Clovis. He will not hurt you now he sees that I speak to you; he is so sensible. Will you come now or another day?' she asked him with the frankness of a boy.
'We have a Latin poet who tells us that to-day alone is our own,' said Loswa with a smile. 'I will come now at once, and most gladly. Clovis is a grand dog and a good guard for his young mistress,' he added; thinking to himself, 'how lovely she is, and she knows it no more than if she were a sea anemone on the shore; and she looks at me and speaks to me with no more embarrassment than if I were but the wooden figure of a ship!'
'I will come up most gladly,' he said again, with more ardour than he showed in a duchess's drawing-rooms. 'It is so very kind of you. I am sure the view from the summit must be magnificent. I fear though,' he added, with hypocritical modesty, 'that it will be beyond my powers.'
'I hope not. I shall like to see anyone paint,' she said with cordiality; and added, a little ashamed, 'I have never seen anyone paint; I have heard of such a thing of course, and there are the pictures in the churches and chapels which one knows were painted by men; but I have no idea of how it is done.'
'You should have been shown by Raphael himself,' said Loswa.
'Raphael?' she echoed. 'Oh no, he is our fruit-packer; he would not know how to do it any better than I do,' she said as she turned and began to ascend to show him the way.
'Can you climb?' she added, looking at him doubtfully. 'I mean climb where it is like a stone wall?'
She had taken him under her protection and into her favour, but he felt that he would have preferred to this frank innocent friendliness a certain hesitation and embarrassment such as would have indicated a different kind of sentiment as possible. She was as kind to him, as simple and frank and candid with him, as if he were any old fisherman that she had known from her birth. It was not what he desired, yet it had a certain charm; it was so childlike, so honest, so free from all affectation or self-consciousness, or lurking suspicion or intention of any sort.
'Clovis is so good,' she pursued, all unconscious of his reflections. 'His wife (she is called Brunehildt) had four puppies yesterday. Two were drowned; it was such a pity! I am going to give one of the two left to Monsignor; he is always fond of dogs. Take care how you come up, it is very steep; for me I am used to it. I run up and down a dozen times a day; but a person not used to it may slip.'
It was, indeed, steep, and often there were ledges of rock in the way which had to be jumped over or scrambled over in any handiest fashion, whilst on others the perpendicular face of the cliff could only be ascended by the rope-ladder so often