Othmar. Ouida
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