Othmar. Ouida
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